Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist

Sylvia Acevedo's Path to the Stars is a real life story for 10 year olds, told by a woman who grew up speaking Spanish in a small New Mexico town and ended up working on rockets.

What happens

She opens with a kaleidoscope. She used to hold it up to the moon in the back yard and twist it, and years later the same patterns reminded her of molecules and circuit diagrams. The toy hadn't changed. She had.

Then she goes right back to the beginning, and this is where it gets good.

A house on Griggs Street, on a road that wasn't even paved. Her mother singing along to the Spanish stations from across the border in Juárez, then scooping up the baby and dancing round the kitchen. Her father at the library most afternoons, because five small children was more than he could stand.

Sylvia starts school speaking only Spanish. A nun called Hermana Díaz teaches her English twice a week, one song and one letter at a time, and something clicks. She starts counting everything she passes (people, trees, cars, in both languages) and never really stops.

There's a lovely bit where she sees a map of the United States and asks whether the lines between the states are marked on the ground outside.

Then her little sister Laura wakes up burning with fever and doesn't know her.

There's a stretch in the middle that's very sad, and it's worth knowing it's coming. Laura goes into hospital with meningitis. Sylvia overhears her father saying several people nearby have caught it and a few have died, then he stops, because he's seen her standing there. She's five. She spends days being told nothing, waving up at her mother through a hospital window from the car park. The chapter is called The World Becomes a Dark and Scary Place.

For a child who has had a seriously ill brother or sister, that's a lot. For most readers it's the engine of the book, because what follows is a girl taking charge of her own life. The Brownies arrive not long after, and it's the Girl Scouts who teach her to plan, to handle money, and to believe college is for her.

What to read next

For another girl whose family is doing everything the hard way, Kelly Yang's Front Desk is in the library. Mia's parents run a motel, her mum was an engineer back in China, and Mia wants to be a writer.