2 July 2015 ORBITING JUPITER by Gary D. Schmidt, Clarion, October 2015, 192p., ISBN: 978-0-544-46222-9

“‘Would you have left a guy being beat up to go find a teacher?’ I asked.

“My father, he wiped his hand across his face, and what was left behind was a smile.

“Really, a smile.

“‘Not in a million years,’ he said.

“‘John!’ said my mother.

“‘Well, he asked,’ said my father. ‘Just be careful, Jack. Be careful.’”

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy; The Wednesday Wars; and Trouble are three well-known historical novels for young people by Gary D. Schmidt. Each of the three contains a complex, exceptionally well-drawn father character. Each of the three fictional fathers exhibits notable blind spots and character flaws. These sophisticated portrayals of father characters are one of the reasons that Gary Schmidt is one of my all-time favorite authors. 

In ORBITING JUPITER, Schmidt’s latest tale, there are three very different father characters. One is fourteen-year-old Joseph Brook, both a foster child and the father to a baby girl named Jupiter who Joseph has never been permitted to meet in person. The second is Joseph Brook’s abusive father. The third is John Hurd, the father of the story’s twelve-year-old narrator Jack Hurd.  In John Hurd, Gary Schmidt has drawn an ideal father, the father that I wish I’d had.

ORBITING JUPITER is, foremost, the tragic story of Joseph. Joseph Brook is a young man who has gone from living with his abusive father, to being placed in a group home, to living at Adams Lake Juvenile, and then--after reportedly trying to kill a teacher--to being incarcerated in a high-security facility, Stone Mountain. Now, after enduring a world of hurt and sorrow, he has been taken in as a foster child at the organic farm in Eastham, Maine, where John Hurd and his wife took in Jack nearly a dozen years earlier.

ORBITING JUPITER is also Jack Hurd’s story of becoming a friend and brother to Joseph.

Jack Hurd’s path stands in sharp contrast to those of Turner Buckminster (from Lizzie Bright), Holling Hoodhood (from The Wednesday Wars), and Henry Smith (from Trouble). This is specifically because Jack has a father who is so much more enlightened and more loving than the fathers of Schmidt’s previous main characters. Turner, Holling, and Henry each embark upon journeys to make things right in their respective worlds, despite their fathers. Jack Hurd takes off WITH his father to find Joseph when the young man disappears, presumably in hopes of tracking down and finally meeting his baby.

This is a tragic story. As Jack Hurd admits to having done, I wept a number of times, too.

But ORBITING JUPITER does also contain a good dose of Gary Schmidt’s folksy humor. And what is intriguing to see here are last names which pop up in this contemporary tale that we recall from characters in Schmidt’s historical novels. Presumably, Coach Swieteck in ORBITING JUPITER is Doug Swieteck’s older brother Lucas (from Schmidt’s sequel to The Wednesday Wars, Okay for Now). I’m absolutely dying to know how John Hurd and Ernie Hupfer from ORBITING JUPITER are related, respectively, to Mrs. Elia Hurd from Lizzie Bright and Danny Hupfer from The Wednesday Wars. Clearly the connections are there.

It’s kind of sad to wait years for another book from Gary Schmidt and then have it read in one sitting. But ORBITING JUPITER is such a gripping tale that I had no other choice.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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