Lost (and Found) at Sea and in Space

Middle grade literature has increasingly incorporated the natural world into its story lines, projecting home and school conflicts onto the greater landscape (and vice versa). “Julia and the Shark,” by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and “Simon Sort of Says,” by Erin Bow, are two recent additions to this canon. Both books explore trauma and mental health, along with the usual travails of growing up, via gentle first-person narration, but the voices of their titular characters make for wholly different reading experiences.

“This is the story of the summer I lost my mum and found a shark older than trees,” is one of the first things 10-year-old Julia tells us in JULIA AND THE SHARK (Union Square Kids, 224 pp., $18.99, ages 10 and up). “Don’t worry though,” she adds, “that doesn’t spoil the ending.”

Julia and her parents have moved temporarily into a lighthouse in Scotland (which her computer-programmer father has been hired to make work automatically) so that her mother, a marine biologist, can track an elusive shark. Her mother’s behavior soon becomes erratic, and Julia struggles to balance her concern for her with her own desperate need to keep the family afloat emotionally.

When Julia says she “lost” her mum, she’s not speaking about death. She’s referring to another kind of loss, caused by mental illness. Julia and her mother have a close relationship based on mutual respect, curiosity about the natural world, and resilience; when Mum starts slipping away, we feel Julia’s pain, and her mother’s pain, too.

Hargrave handles this arc with authenticity and empathy powered by lyrical writing, which seems effortless and is often masterly, as in this description of Julia’s mum: “Her eyes had huge dark smudges under them like storm clouds, and there was an unsettling energy around her too, like the approaching crackle of lightning.”

Such rich and vivid prose (punctuated by turbulent passages from a notebook in which Julia records her nighttime dreams) makes the setting a character in its own right; you can practically taste the salt on your tongue.

The novel is interwoven with beautiful illustrations by Tom de Freston. Taken as a separate entity, they are evocative, emotive, full of movement and language. When in dialogue with the text, however, they are puzzling.

In Hargrave’s story, Julia befriends Kin, a small, soft-spoken Indian boy who wears a rakhi bracelet his sister gave him. Kin has been viciously bullied for years by a boy named Adrian and his minions. Adrian is racist and homophobic toward Kin and soon catches Julia in his cross hairs, calling her a whale. Julia has been bullied like this before. Some girls at her school, she tells us in an earlier chapter, called her “Flubber” and “poked her belly.” But, in a perplexing disconnect, de Freston’s artwork shows a girl who is lean, even slight. Without further context, this lack of cohesion is out of sync.

Adrian receives redemption toward the end, which some readers may feel is unearned. Ultimately, however, this is a minor subplot.

The heartbeat of the novel is the relationship between Julia and her mother, conveyed in a contemplative tone with sprinklings of humor.

Bow’s SIMON SORT OF SAYS (Disney Hyperion, 320 pp., $16.99, ages 8 to 12) is the reverse: a funny book with weighty moments of contemplation. On the surface, it doesn’t seem like it has any business being funny: Simon O’Keeffe is the sole survivor of a school shooting. But Bow demonstrates an ability to tackle difficult topics without being didactic.

Her characters are authentic, multidimensional and complex, beginning with Simon, who has moved with his family from Omaha to a new home in the National Quiet Zone, an area of the United States where the internet is banned so radio astronomers can listen for signs of life in space. For Simon, whose face was plastered all over the national media, this is a dream come true. He can start a new life, with a new back story. And that’s just what he does. He tells people his family was driven out of Omaha by wild alpacas.

Readers will align themselves easily with Simon, a likable, relatable kid who wants nothing more than to be a different person. Early in the novel, he befriends Agate, a self-assured girl with bright red hair and red and yellow pompoms on her purple hoodie. Agate introduces herself by plopping down cross-legged in front of Simon while he’s eating lunch in his favorite “out of the way” spot at school and saying, “What is the most disgusting thing you know?” Simon’s mother is an undertaker, so he quickly shares a disgusting fact about corpses. Agate immediately deems him worthy of her company and tells him about her secret plan to fake a radio transmission from aliens. It doesn’t take much convincing to bring Simon into the fold. He’s eager to show his parents that he’s recovering nicely, and having friends is one way to do that.

But the trauma of his past simmers just under the surface. At one point, he describes what it’s like to avoid talking about hurtful things: “It’s like when you get a bad sore throat, and you chew over things a little too long because you know in a second you have to swallow and it’s gonna hurt.”

The book delivers on laughs, but it also keeps us alert the whole time. We hold our breath, chew a little longer, knowing that Simon will eventually have to face the enormity of what he’s experienced. When he finally confronts the question that’s been weighing on him — “Why didn’t they get saved, instead of me?” — it’s a fully realized journey from denial to recovery.

“Simon Sort of Says” is a perfectly paced, layered novel that never speaks down to its readers and handles difficult situations with remarkable sensitivity. Bow hits all the right chords and delivers a story that is funny, poignant and — most important — hopeful.

Erin Entrada Kelly, a Newbery Medal winner, is the author, most recently, of “Those Kids From Fawn Creek.”