Living on a farm as an only child with the same schedule every day is never very interesting. Milking the cows, feeding the horses, going to school, coming back home, milking the cows and feeding the horses. But, one day you find out that your parents will be fostering a boy that is around your age. You meet him, and are curious to know why it is that he rarely talks and never smiles. You want to know more about this kid’s past. Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt is about two boys who never realized how much they need each other. Joseph is fourteen, and recently left juvie. Jack is twelve, and is the son of the couple fostering Joseph. These two boys go through thick and thin together trying to overcome the challenges that make them go from two boys to two brothers.
Orbiting Jupiter addresses issues such as teen parents, bullying, and juvie. Joseph is someone who has had to deal with all three of those issues. At the age of fourteen, Joseph is already a father to a little girl named Jupiter and he was forced to give up custody of her because of his age, and that’s the last thing he wants to do. On top of that, he cannot even see the mother because her parents filed a restraining order on Joseph. When Joseph finally gets out of juvie, he is put in a foster home with Jack. So, of course Joseph has to go to school, so he goes as an eighth grader at Jack’s school. On the very first day of school for Joseph, he and Jack are waiting at the bus stop. When the bus pulls up, they get on but the bus driver makes a smart remark and Joseph stops dead in his tracks and gets off the bus. This is an example of how Joseph is treated everyday by his bus driver and a handful of other people.
One reason that I like this book is because there is always something going on. It never drags on, even when they are at home milking the cows. The author does a very good job of telling the story and helping the reader understand Joseph, even without a lot of dialogue. You can almost paint a picture in your head. An example of this is “[Joseph] looked like a regular… kid… Black eyes, black hair almost over his eyes, a little less than middle for weight, sort of middle for everything else. He really could have been any other eight-grade kid at Eastham Middle School”(4) because it describes how Joseph looks. I can visualize what he looks like, which is nice to know because a lot of books do not do that.
Another thing that makes this book so good is that this book is relatable to middle school readers because of their ages, even if some of the challenges that are thrown at them are not ones that they have faced before. I, for one, know that a handful of the problems that Jack and Joseph have, I never had to deal with, but I could really relate with them. In one scene, these mean boys are in the locker room, along with Joseph and they are fighting him. Jack goes into the locker room because he senses something isn’t right. So, he goes in, and sure enough, there they are. So after the fight, Jack gets called down to talk with the vice principal’s office to talk. The vice principal says to Jack “So you want to tell me what a sixth grader was doing in the eight-grade side of the locker room, in an eight-grade fight?” (96) and to me, it is relatable because people are always being split up into groups. Being categorized as “a” or “b” and “this” or “that”. This book really spoke to me in that way.
I connected Orbiting Jupiter to Count on Me by Bruno Mars because Joseph and Jack become like brothers and they can count on each other for anything because they are not foster brothers anymore. They are brothers who would sacrifice themselves for one another. Like Bruno Mars says “You can count on me like one two three I'll be there. And I know when I need it I can count on you like four three two You'll be there” which I think is a very good way to show how Jack and Joseph care for eachother. Here is the link to Bruno Mars’ song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMsvwwp6S7Q
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a heartfelt book about friendship and family. I would also recommend this book to any middle schooler that wants to find a book that they can relate to.
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