A dual-perspective story of two girls with a love of engineering and a crush on each other, who are also each struggling with different family difficulties. Set at the same junior high as author Michelle Mohrweis’s The Trouble With Robots, this volume brings us all-new protagonists and situations with some recurring secondary characters.
Seventh-grader Maggie Weir, who is autistic and ADHD, wants to be an aerospace engineer. The only thing she likes more than spacecraft might be Tatum Jones, the smart, pretty, popular, baton-twirling eighth-grader she has a crush on. Maggie’s mom, the school robotics teacher (whom we met in The Trouble With Robots), supports her interest, but also has little time for her—she’s working an extra job at the grocery store to support their family, as Maggie’s dad, a writer, struggles to find his next project. Her dad, for his part, only seems to want to engage with the family for fun stuff, not for the daily work of helping it manage.
When Maggie is randomly teamed up with Tatum for a school project, her first instinct is to run away. When Tatum supports Maggie’s idea of entering a NASA contest for young engineers, however, Maggie is thrilled, though she still wonders if she’ll ever be able to tell Tatum how she feels about her.
Tatum has family problems of her own, though. Her parents always compare her to her actual-genius twin brother, who’s already in college studying engineering. Nothing Tatum does seems to measure up—and her parents are skeptical of her interest in baton twirling, worrying that it’s taking away from her studies.
When Maggie’s dad gets a writing gig for NASA in Houston, and offers to take Maggie with him, she’s torn. She’s always dreamed about going to Space Center Houston. But leaving with her dad would mean changing schools mid year, dropping her project, and abandoning Tatum. Also, she’s not sure if her dad will ever be coming back, as her parents’ marriage seems fractured beyond repair. Whose orbit will she follow—and can she add her own vector to the equation?
Mohrweis, a real-life STEM educator, once again incorporates many bits of STEM learning into the story. (I was particularly taken with the details on 3D printing—my own spouse has 10 3D printers in our house (really!), and from what I’ve learned, Mohrweis gets it right.) More impressive than the STEM factoids, however, is the thoughtful navigation of difficult family issues and the seamless inclusion of characters diverse in many ways.
Mohrweis cautions in their introduction that the characters face “fighting, divorce, and cruelty from the adults who are meant to protect and care for them,” and indeed, some of the adults’ actions are hard to stomach. Nevertheless, it is important to see how Maggie and Tatum face these challenges, and how some of the adults do start to change (although Mohrweis is a good enough writer not to make them all suddenly become perfect).
Notably, too, Maggie isn’t the only autistic character; one of her friends is, too, and Mohrweis (who is autistic themself) makes sure to show that not all autistic people are alike in their thoughts or behaviors. Mohrweis also importantly conveys some of the positive aspects of being neurodivergent—Maggie notes at one point, “It gives me my creativity, I think. And, like, the ability to hyperfocus on things. There is some stuff that’s harder, but that’s mostly because people just don’t understand autism.”
There’s plenty of other diversity among Maggie and Tatum’s friends, too, including a nonbinary character, two boys with a crush on each other, a kid with cerebral palsy, and a variety of racial and ethnic identities. Maggie and Tatum are both White, but most of the supporting case are people of color. As I wrote about the first volume in this series, it’s a character-driven story that authentically celebrates STEM without reading like a textbook. It also celebrates neurodiversity, queerness, and other aspects of identity without reading like a “very special episode” about those identities, even though it gives us glimpses of what it can be like for people of those identities to move in the world.
Highly recommended, and I hope we see more volumes in this universe.
