The Science of Breakable Things

The Science of Breakable Things by Tae Keller is a school-year notebook for 10 year olds about a girl trying to science her mother back.

What happens

Natalie's new science teacher hands out composition books and tells the class to spend the whole year on one big question. He is keen and says his hashtags out loud. Natalie thinks the whole thing is a lost cause.

She cannot come up with a question. That is because the one she actually wants to ask is about her mum.

Her mum is a botanist. She used to build lava lamps and vinegar volcanoes at the kitchen table to get Natalie through her homework, and leave the place looking like a war zone.

Since the summer she has not come out of the bedroom.

Natalie's dad is a therapist, which the book plays fairly gently. He says "give your mother some space" and he says it about absolutely everything, and he fills his office with lamps.

The whole novel is her notebook, with footnotes. The footnotes are where she is funniest and where she says what she really thinks. Her definitions of people are savage. Mikayla, who used to braid her hair and now answers every question without being called on, is filed as Cheaty McCheater.

Then the teacher slips her a flyer for the egg drop, with prize money printed underneath. And Natalie sneaks into that dark bedroom and takes her mother's old book off the shelf, the one with a chapter about an orchid that survives things it has no business surviving.

You can see the plan forming before she can. It is a terrible plan and you want it to work anyway.

Some straight talking now. The depression is the subject here, not the background, and it is written honestly. There is a closed door, a lump on a bed, and a girl who is frightened of her own mother and hates herself for being frightened. A child with somebody poorly at home may find that close to the bone, or may find it the most useful book they read all year. You will know which.

Also, Natalie is at secondary school and sounds it. The voice, the friendship politics and the science-fair stakes all belong to that world. There is a frog dissection in the second week, too.

What to read next

For another girl carrying something she cannot say out loud, Can You Feel the Noise? is in the library. Sophie's band are through to the semifinals of a competition when she wakes up one morning unable to hear a thing.