The Jamie Drake Equation

Christopher Edge's The Jamie Drake Equation is a funny, big-hearted space story for 10 year olds about a boy whose dad is up in space while he's stuck at home with a very loud granddad.

What happens

Jamie's dad is Commander Dan Drake, an actual astronaut on the International Space Station. On Friday he's doing a spacewalk to launch a swarm of tiny probes towards a faraway star, to look for alien life. Friday also happens to be Jamie's birthday.

The whole school is doing Space Week about the mission. You'd think Jamie would love it (and a bit of him does). Mostly, though, he just misses his dad. He's also a little fed up of sharing him with the entire planet.

Home isn't much help. They've moved in with Granddad Neil, a retired heavy metal singer who still drives his old tour van and practises guitar in the barn. VERY loudly.

So Jamie climbs Beacon Hill for some peace and finds an old observatory that's meant to be abandoned. It isn't. There's an astronomer in a pink cardigan inside, searching the whole galaxy for alien signals. She tells him his own surname belongs to a famous sum for working out how many alien civilisations might be out there.

Then Jamie plugs his phone into the wrong cable to charge it. The laptop says a transmission is downloading to his device. From the Hubble Space Telescope. Oops!

Reading it is like having Jamie chat away to you. He's cheeky about his annoying classmate Minty and squirms at everything Granddad does. There's LOTS of real space stuff tucked in too, like the Goldilocks zone and why a ping-pong ball falls slower than a golf ball.

Underneath the jokes you can feel how much he worries. The calls with his dad are short, with a delay on the line, and he never quite gets to say what he wants to. Who hasn't run out of time to say the important thing?

Things do go wrong for Dad up there, so if your reader has a parent who works away, this one might land quite close to home. For a child who loves space facts and aliens it's a brilliant mix of both, with a family story holding it all together.

What to read next

If they're after more aliens and another boy with an embarrassing dad, try Space Oddity. Jake's dad dreams of being a rock star and can't sing a note, and on the night of the school's space-themed concert a flying saucer comes screaming down into the woods nearby.