Jupiter Rising
by Gary D. Schmidt
Middle School    Clarion/HarperCollins    208 pp.
8/24    9780358659648    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780358659549    $9.99

In this companion to Orbiting Jupiter (rev. 11/15), eighth grader Jackson Hurd is mourning the loss of Joseph, his “foster brother, sort of,” and cherishes his role as brother to Joseph’s now-orphaned daughter. Jack adores three-year-old Jupiter and can’t wait to watch her grow up and do things for the first time—read a book, ride a horse on his family’s farm, catch lightning bugs, and “look up into the winter sky and pick out the planet Jupiter rising brighter than any star.” There’s a lustrousness to Schmidt’s simply worded first-person narrative, especially evident in passages about the beauty of Maine. “The clouds broke and the full moon threw everything it had at our house. It beamed into the window and flooded us with silver light so bright that my mother gasped.” Schmidt also creates a cast of memorable secondary characters—running buddy Jay Perkins pushing for more, ornery Coach Swieteck dispensing tough love from his wheelchair, even Judge Benedict encouraging Jack to begin “thinking like a judge.” They all help Jack deal with news he finds devastating: Jupiter’s maternal grandparents are demanding custody. Readers will tread warily through the heart-wrenching, tear-jerking final pages. In this spare novel, Schmidt has created a big world with characters to care about, cry for, and remember.

From the ">November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.