Chasing Orion Book

Chasing Orion is a wholly different sort of fictional perspective on the time of the major U.S. polio outbreak in the early 1950s. Before Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine in 1955, the epidemic of this fearsome and frightening disease ravaged the middle of our country for a span of a few years, littering cities big and small with dead and disfigured citizens as plentifully as discarded candy wrappers, and understandably causing much fear and some degree of panic in people who were afraid that they, or their families, might be next. Author Kathryn Lasky doesn't leave the task of imagining polio's dangers up to our imagination; there are several stories told in Chasing Orion like the one about a family with four kids, all healthy, who lost all four children to death by polio in a period of twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours. I can't even begin to get a mental grip on what it would be like to be the parent of a normal, bustling family of energetic kids one day, with nothing going too badly, and then the next day have only the morbid silence of death surrounding you, your dreams for those four kids you loved wiped away forever in hardly more than the blink of an eye. The message that these side stories in the book send is that polio is not something to be played around with, and there was reason for the seemingly heavy-handed methods of caution utilized by the parental characters in this book.

It's summer of 1952 in Indiana, and eleven-year-old Georgie has sort of a duel fear and fascination with the polio epidemic sweeping the nation. She resents the severe restrictions that her parents have put in place as guards against her or her older brother, Emmett, possibly contracting the deadly disease. These prohibitions mean no going to movie theaters, no swimming in public pools... basically, any activity that requires being in close quarters with large groups of people for any length of time is no longer a permissible one. Polio is most often passed interpersonally by lack of simple cleanliness measures, and such innocuous faux pas as not washing one's hands after using the bathroom or not being careful while sneezing can spread the sickness. Georgie knows all about how bad it's getting out there; the fascination part of her reaction to the polio outbreak is that she has taken to memorizing lists of all the new entertainment venues and recreation centers that are closing down around the area each week, and every day she scans the newspaper lists of new polio victims and notes the towns in which they live. Georgie is a smart girl overall, though, so it's not all that alarming for her to take an interest in a current event that affects her life as does the polio issue. Georgie's first academic love is the splendrous study of the cosmos, though, and she makes time frequently to gaze at the nighttime skies with her brother Emmett, trying to see if they can unlock any of the secrets of the universe with their own observation skills.

In addition to the discomfort of the polio situation, Georgie's life has become harder ever since her family moved across town after the end of the previous school year. Their new house is only two miles away from their former one, but now that she no longer lives in her old neighborhood with all of her friends, it's as if everything has changed vitally. Her old friends are all in the loop about what's going on around their neighborhood, but Georgie really doesn't know anything new about that. She quickly sees the writing on the wall that the shelf life of her former relationships is going to be a really short one, so now she is left in a new neighborhood, with no friends, and in the fall she will be starting at a new school. Things can't get much worse.

How could Georgie ever have guessed that living in the house next door to her would be an actual girl who has been desiccated by polio? Phyllis, a high-school girl of about the same age as Emmett, has been ravaged by the ferocious disease. Her motor muscles below her neck have almost all been destroyed by the infection that swept through her body more than a year ago, and now she is confined to an iron lung at all times. Without the machine, she wouldn't even be able to breathe, since the muscles that control her respiration have been damaged beyond repair. Phyllis's father is a respected doctor who has invented some new gadgets to try to help her be able to live a decent life, including an intricate setup of mirrors that give her the ability to look basically anywhere that a fully ambulatory person would be able look, but her quality of life is low. It doesn't take long before Georgie picks up on the truth that Phyllis's father and mother may be excited about their daughter's future and unwilling to admit to themselves how trapped she is in her mangled body, but Phyllis herself has resigned to the fact that there's no real happiness in her future. She's just a girl serving a life sentence incarcerated in a machine, with no way out of the mess her existence has become.

Phyllis's situation will challenge Georgie and Emmett, each in different ways, as they try to earn some form of understanding of what the ordeal that is Phyllis's life must be like for her. Phyllis has a charismatic and intriguing personality, and is well able to interact with people in ways that leave them feeling different and better for the experience, but it's the one big request she's building up to that will test the limits of Georgie and Emmett's relationship as brother and sister, and force them to confront their deepest ethical beliefs about life, and how far one should go to help a friend in distress.

I think that Kathryn Lasky really did a nice job with this book. To me, the story seems exceptionally original and unexpected, a great example of historical fiction with a few alternative angles that we rarely see from novels for younger readers. As in other "star" books such as Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli, The Same Stuff as Stars by Katherine Paterson and Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass, Chasing Orion does a truly beautiful job of juxtaposing the vastness and eternally mysterious nature of the universe beyond our earth with the complicated struggles that we sometimes face here on our planet, the majestic cosmos serving as a constant reminder of how small what we may be going through is in comparison to the endless enigmas of space, but also how we know deep inside, somehow, that what we do matters. The heavens glow onward with a beauty that none of us can comprehend, but the wonder of our own lives is not to be missed, not for a single moment.

Kathryn Lasky is a very solid, consistent novelist whose work I look forward to reading again in the future. Chasing Orion certainly comes with my earnest recommendation.