The Secret Astronomers

In this intriguing epistolary novel, Walker (Baby Feminists) employs multimedia formatting to chronicle the anonymous, pen pal–adjacent friendship between two high school seniors in 2016 rural Green Bank, W.Va. When a cryptic letter left to her by her recently deceased mother, an astrophysicist raised in Green Bank, leads one of the teens to an 1888 astronomy textbook (the “oldest book in the Green Bank High School Library”), the high schooler—an artistic newcomer from San Francisco who takes the pseudonym Copernicus—begins crafting handwritten letters to her mom on the book’s pages. Copernicus’s writing is then found by a second teen called Kepler—a gifted student whose family runs “generations deep in Pocahontas County”—who replies via sticky note. Soon the two team up to unravel the puzzle of Copernicus’s mother’s history in Green Bank as well as her link to unexplained events in the late 1980s, along the way forming a close connection. The students’ alternating perspectives are occasionally indistinguishable, but sustained tension surrounding the central mystery and the duo’s anonymity, as well as their focus on astrology, anchor this conceptually innovative solo debut. Photo collages and Copernicus’s drawings feature throughout. The protagonists read as white. Ages 12–up. (Nov.)