Orbiting Jupiter

Overview

Orbiting Jupiter is narrated by twelve-year-old Jack, whose family takes in Joseph, a fourteen-year-old foster child sent to live on their Maine farm after a stint in a juvenile facility. Joseph arrives guarded and nearly silent, but Jack and his parents slowly earn enough trust to learn what he carries: Joseph is the father of a baby girl named Jupiter, born when he himself was barely more than a child, and he has not been allowed to see her since she was taken from him.

Much of the novel traces the quiet, unglamorous work of a family trying to help a deeply wounded boy function again — chores, school, small rituals of belonging — while Joseph's single fixed hope is reunion with his daughter. Schmidt lets that hope coexist with the harsher facts of Joseph's history, including a dangerous, unresolved relationship with his own father.

The story builds toward a sudden, wrenching turn when that past catches up with Joseph, reshaping the quiet rural narrative into something closer to tragedy. What follows asks Jack, and the reader, to sit with loss and to find whatever continuity and care can still be salvaged afterward.

A Story of Fractured Families and Inherited Harm

Schmidt, known for grounding young narrators in rural settings and unhurried pacing, uses Jack's limited, first-person understanding to filter events that are themselves far from simple. The novel is less interested in explaining how Joseph came to be a father so young than in showing what it costs a child to carry an adult's burden of love and responsibility without an adult's resources or protections.

Foster care, generational cycles of neglect, and the gap between institutional judgment and personal truth run through the book. Jack's own steady, intact home becomes a quiet counterpoint to Joseph's instability, and the novel resists easy resolution — its ending offers continuity rather than closure, centering on the family's ongoing commitment rather than a tidy restoration of what was lost. The book has drawn praise for refusing to soften Joseph's circumstances into something more comfortable for a young audience, even as that same unflinching quality has made it a point of contention in some communities.

Why Orbiting Jupiter Has Been Challenged

Much of the friction around Orbiting Jupiter centers less on whether the book has merit than on who should be handed it and where it should sit on a shelf, since Schmidt's reputation and spare, middle-grade-friendly prose can mask how heavy its subject matter actually is. Objecting parents and reviewers have pointed to the fact that Joseph became a father as a young teenager, a detail that implicates an adult's abuse of a child even though the novel itself declines to dwell on it graphically. Others have cited the threat and eventual violence involving Joseph's father, including a scene of armed intimidation, as too intense for the elementary and early-middle-grade readers who might encounter the book based on its length and reading level alone. The portrayal of parental neglect, institutional failure, and a death resulting from that violence has further fueled concern that the book's emotional weight outpaces the maturity of its intended shelving. According to the records tracked in this catalog, these concerns have led to challenges in 2 states and 2 school districts.