We Dream of Space

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapter 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Adolescent Identity and Self-Perception

Bird, Fitch, and Cash each confront circumstances in the novel in how they are perceived contrasts with how they feel about themselves. The characters’ social contexts shape how they see themselves, how they are seen by others, and how they feel about both.

When Cash breaks his wrist, he is forced to confront his inability to participate in athletic activities. Cash is also repeating seventh grade, and he feels the fracturing in his relationships with his peers, especially with his two closest friends, who will be graduating middle school, as Cash might have been. The isolation and embarrassment that Cash feels at school, where everyone knows he failed a grade and many him differently as a result, is combined with his isolation from the sport that he enjoys and the social atmosphere and camaraderie that came with being part of the team. Cash is inspired to discover for himself what he is good at, and his identity evolves as he attaches himself not to one role or label, but as he defines himself as someone determined to succeed by finding what makes him uniquely valuable.

Bird has always received admiration and reinforcement from her teachers for her scholastic aptitude, but as often happens in middle school, Bird begins to contemplate her appearance, in her own estimations as well as how she appears to her peers. Like Cash, Bird, who is told that being pretty isn’t her thing, but that being smart is, feels reduced to a single role and relegated to a certain set of expectations. Bird is also understood to be the person in her family and among her schoolmates who has everything figured out; she is easygoing and accommodating, thoughtful and nonconfrontational. For the first time, with the explosion of the Challenger and the deaths of the astronauts on board, Bird is the one who is thrown into emotional upheaval and begins to see the world as a daunting and frustrating place.

While he never becomes physically violent, Fitch struggles to repress his anger and not lash out at his friends and family, often insulting and alienating his parents and siblings, and choosing to distance himself from his peers. When Fitch reaches his limit and shouts insults at Amanda in Ms. Salonga’s class, he becomes the topic of gossip and speculation and then admiration and awe. It becomes clear that hostility and rancor are expected of Fitch, and that his peers consider him unstable, while also seeing him a rebellious and worthy of respect. When Fitch begins to feel empathy for Amanda for how he treated her, he is moved to apologize, even if he can’t be certain of what the outcome will be.

Setting Boundaries in Complex Family Dynamics

When Fitch’s mother asks him how he could have been so cruel to Amanda, Fitch is shocked by her hypocrisy. Fitch is incensed by how oblivious his mother appears to be of the impact that the arguments between she and her husband have on their children. Fitch has been subjected to witnessing harsh words being exchanged regularly, especially as a response to being annoyed by a romantic partner. Amanda’s romantic interest in Fitch perhaps triggers his internal references to how men and women typically interact with each other when their levels of patience are tested. Fitch is also embarrassed by Amanda’s affection for him, and, because Fitch feels his parents’ behavior is so odious, he engages in similar behavior because he hopes it will discourage Amanda from pursuing him any further.

Bird is fascinated by the home life of her friend Dani Logan, whose parents are kind and engaging. Bird had believed that families who sat down to dinner together were a phenomenon only represented in television shows. At her lowest point, Bird sneaks into Dani Logan’s house alone and imagines what it might be like to have supportive parents to help her to process her sadness over the Challenger disaster. While she spends so much of her time attempting to avoid or diffuse arguments between her parents, Bird never becomes angry or resentful with them the way her brother does or considers that her parents are perhaps doing her a disservice by allowing their arguments to affect their children.

Conversely, Fitch openly resents his parents for the constant conflict they perpetuate throughout the house, even shouting at them at one point during the novel to ask why they ever got married. Cash is baffled by the idea that his father can sit casually beside him on the couch watching the basketball game after engaging in a heated argument with their mother only moments before. When Cash expresses his interest in his classmate Penny, his father advises him that the best way to get a popular girl to take notice of him would be to establish the other young men who like her as somehow inferior to him. This advice backfires horribly when Cash keeps in mind his father’s adage “all’s fair in love and war,” and openly insults Penny’s boyfriend, calling him a dork and earning her open contempt for him and dismissal of his advice as irrelevant in response.

When the children choose to exclude their parents from their dinner in the back yard, they set a boundary between themselves and their caregivers, choosing to preserve their own relationships with each other and their own well-being over trying to make their parents into people they aren’t.

Space Exploration and Discovery

NASA’s space program in the 1980s was a significant source of pride for Americans, a popular culture phenomenon which was celebrated and extensively covered and hyped in the media. The Challenger mission was a source of excitement for the nation because teacher Christa McAuliffe was selected from thousands of teachers nationwide to undergo training and accompany the astronauts into space.

Ms. Salonga involves her students in an exercise asking them to ponder the reasons why space travel and exploration might be considered important, relevant, and worthy of pursuit. These questions are being asked by the nation at large as well. Despite the hype of the space program, there were many detractors who did not feel that space travel was an especially relevant area of research. These attitudes are echoed by some students at Park Middle School who not only have no interest in Ms. Salonga’s unit on the Challenger, but who make light of the situation after the disaster.

The fears that Ms. Salonga expresses about what the disaster might mean for the space program at large are representative of concerns that were shared by many Americans, astronauts, academics, and civilians. For many, the significant government funding allotted to the space program did not seem to align with the program’s applicable value to life on earth; many people believed government resources would be better spent elsewhere. Ms. Salonga and others were concerned that the Challenger would be the perfect excuse for shutting down the space program and severely curtailing NASA’s myriad projects. Historical figures and characters like Bird, Ms. Salonga, Judith Resnik, and Christa McAuliffe represent the passion for discovering the mystery of what lies beyond planet earth present in adults and children alike. This curiosity and quest for understanding, gave meaning to the Challenger mission despite its tragic outcome.