CHASING ORION
by Kathryn Lasky
Candlewick Press
ISBN: 9780763639822
Ages 10-up
368 pages
When 11-year-old Georgie’s family moves to a new house, Georgie feels like she’s the only one left out. Her parents have each other, after all, and her older brother Emmett has his basketball friends. But Georgie has no friends in her new neighborhood, and she’ll be heading to a new school in the fall, where she won’t know anyone either. What’s more, the polio epidemic means that Georgie can’t go to the pool, or to her beloved movie theater, or pretty much anywhere where there might be people gathered together, out of fear that she might contract the debilitating, potentially deadly disease.
So, for the long, hot, Indiana summer, Georgie’s world consists of her house, her backyard and the library, where she meets a new friend, Evelyn, who, although not as “cool” as her old friends, still makes her laugh when they meet or talk on the phone. But most fascinating to Georgie is her next-door neighbor, Phyllis, a beautiful blonde teenager who is almost paralyzed and has to remain locked in an iron lung in order to breathe. Phyllis is beautiful and stylish, and seems genuinely interested not only in Georgie’s favorite hobby --- building “small worlds,” dioramas based on books and legends --- but also, romantically, in Emmett.
As the months pass and Georgie grows increasingly interested in Phyllis, both as a role model for her own impending adolescence and as a potential girlfriend for her shy, awkward, science-obsessed brother, she begins to suspect that Phyllis is not simply the tragic victim others may initially believe. Phyllis has a complicated relationship with her parents. Her mother reads Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”
obsessively to Phyllis, seemingly oblivious to the bitter resonance the story about a woman trapped in a tower might have with her daughter’s own circumstances; Phyllis’s father channels his love, grief and sadness into inventing a series of elaborate contraptions that will supposedly ease Phyllis’s condition, but that his daughter couldn’t care less about.
Meanwhile, Georgie makes it her mission not only to help Phyllis try to have a normal life but also to show her brother how to fall in love. It turns out, though, that the real world isn’t as easy to control or contain as the worlds Georgie creates in boxes and frames.
In CHASING ORION, Kathryn Lasky perfectly evokes the climate of fear that surrounded the polio epidemic as well as the larger 1950s culture, mores and fads. Most affecting, however, is Georgie’s position on the cusp of adolescence. She’s fascinated by teenagers, particularly Betty and Veronica in the Archie comics she adores, and she’s worried that she herself, with her unmanageable hair and awkward body, won’t transform into the kind of graceful, elegant, talented teenage girl she idolizes. Meanwhile, her friendship with Phyllis provides Georgie with a confusing glimpse into the moral complexities not only of adolescence but also of the adult world. Phyllis’s disease has forced her to grow up too quickly, and Georgie’s encounters with Phyllis introduce her to the heartbreaking and complicated adult realms of manipulation and bitterness as well as love.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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