The Secret Astronomers
by Jessica Walker; illus. by the author
Middle School, High School    Viking    304 pp.
11/25    9780593692677    $19.99

This inventive epistolary novel is presented as a series of notes taped or stuck into an old astronomy textbook in a Green Bank, West Virginia, high school library. At first the notes are all addressed to one student’s late mother, but soon a classmate begins responding, and the two give themselves and the people they discuss code names for anonymity. “Copernicus” (she/they), who lived in San Francisco until their mother’s recent death, is now living in their mom’s hometown with their “Holy-Roller country-bumpkin” grandparents. “Kepler” (she/her) spends most of the school day in an offsite gifted program, which provides enough separation between the correspondents to preserve relative anonymity. The control the narrators have over what they share about themselves (and when) means revelations are paced so that readers may also find their perceptions changing. Still, their lives become intertwined as they work together to solve a mystery surrounding Copernicus’s mom’s past in Green Bank, and while they’re at it, Kepler might just gain some insight into her own family. The grieving Copernicus’s strong but guarded curiosity about their mother is believable, as is the bluster in both teen narrators’ evolving attitudes in the charged setting of 2016. The notes, as well as Copernicus’s collages and drawings, overlap with the astronomy textbook’s paragraphs, creating a sense of the book as a physical artifact.

From the January/February 2026 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.