Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe by Carlos Hernandez is a funny, loud science fiction story for 9 year olds about a boy who can reach into other universes and has decided he'd rather stop.

What happens

Sal Vidon is in seventh grade, diabetic, a very good stage magician, and the son of a physicist who builds enormous machines in the living room. He's a few years older than the shelf age here, which shows in the friendship teasing and not much else.

He's also been tearing small holes in the fabric of spacetime since his mum died, five years ago. Sometimes he pulls things through. Sometimes he pulls people through.

The book opens with a text message at still dark o'clock. Papi thinks he's finally fixed it. Sal presses the key himself, and the part of his mother he's been carrying inside his chest simply goes.

Then a voice exactly like his best friend Gabi's starts talking to him out of thin air. It isn't Gabi. It's a Gabi, from somewhere else, and she says she's coming to fix everything.

Reading it is closer to stand-up than science fiction. Sal is very funny and very fast. He does accents. He argues with you, the reader, mid-sentence. His stepmother is called American Stepmom throughout (she spends the opening in flying squirrel pyjamas, skin flaps and all), and their teasing is the warmest thing in the book.

The Spanish in this household isn't translated, so your reader picks it up from context the way Sal's schoolfriends do.

Grief is the engine here, so it's worth going in knowing. Sal's mother died of diabetic complications, he has the same condition, and the book says so on its first pages. He has a recurring dream where she's alive and cooking, and describes waking from it as feeling like his mother's grave. He isn't sad for long stretches. Nobody tidies it away either.

For a child who's lost someone, that may be exactly right or may be too close. You'll know which. For everyone else it's a story about a boy deciding to stop picking at a scab, wrapped in jokes about robot nostrils.

What to read next

One thing to sort out first. This is the second book and it assumes you know Sal, Gabi and her baby brother already. Start with Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, where Sal has just landed at a new arts school in Miami and deals with the biggest boy in his year using a raw chicken.