What a gem of a book. We Dream of Space hit me in all the 12-year-old-Tamara feels, from the focus on the Challenger shuttle disaster to the obsessions with Star Wars, from the sense that you don’t quite belong to the feeling of being not quite “enough” at anything. And then the suckerpunch for 46-year-old-Tamara? The fact that this book, so intensely familiar to me with its 1986 setting, is labelled “historical fiction”. Ouch.

The main action of this book covers the month of January 1986, and Bird and her brother’s social science teacher is counting down. She’d applied for the Teacher in Space program, a spot that eventually went to Christa McAauliffe, who I wanted to be, and whose motto about her life is one I’ve used to guide my career. Bird is obsessed with space, and equally obsessed with machines – she pulls apart anything vaguely mechanical she can get her hands on and draws her own “birds eye view” schematics of how they work, in an effort to make sense of her world. Her twin brother Fitch spends every moment possible playing Major Havoc at the arcade, and wrestles with an explosive temper he doesn’t understand. And their older brother Cash is in the same grade as them after failing the previous year, loves basketball but isn’t good enough, and feels like a failure at everything. They share a house with their parents who constantly fight, but they all exist in their own orbits, with their own dreams of of hope, belonging, friendship, family and space.

This is a truly special read, and even though I knew it was going to break my heart to revisit January 28, 1986, I felt so cherished and supported along with these wonderful characters through Kelly’s beautifully sensitive and compassionate writing that I was happy to go on that journey again. This is going to be one of my best books of the year, I can feel it. Not just the best middle grade book, but one of the best overall.