Book review: The Thing About Jellyfish
“There was a time when my mom knew what had happened to you, when the weight of it had already hit her and I was just running through the grass like it was any other day. And there was a time when someone else knew and my mom didn’t. And a time when your mom knew and almost no one else on the planet did.
And that means that there was a time when you were gone and no one on Earth had any idea. Just you, all alone, disappearing into the water and no one even wondering yet.
And that is an incredibly lonely thing to think about.”
Suzy – ‘Zu’ to her mom – is weird, the kind of weird she never had to think about until sixth grade. Even though her parents chastised her for talking too much, for excitedly sharing facts and trivia about the world rather than listening to others, her best friend Franny always got her. They swore they’d tell each other if they ever became the kind of girls obsessed with boys and popularity and cosmetics. They’d have a sign.
But when it happens – when Franny becomes one of the cool girls who shuns Suzy for her oddness – the message hasn’t been agreed on. And when, that summer, Franny drowns in a freak accident, Suzy can’t forgive herself for what’s happened, or shake the feeling that if she’d only known the last time they saw each other was the last time, things would look very different.
Suzy’s seventh-grade science teacher assigns them a report, and those instructions shape the structure for the novel – the book is divided up into ‘hypothesis’, ‘variables’, ‘procedure’ and so on. After a trip to the New England Aquarium and an exhibit of eerie creatures that seem like ‘ghost hearts’, her research leads her to jellyfish – and a particular deadly kind that she’s convinced caused Franny’s death. She may be barely talking to her parents, her therapist, or anyone in school, but her mind is whirring: which experts can she talk to? Who might help her uncover the truth about what happened?
Ali Benjamin’s background as a science writer is evident throughout the scientific facts dotted throughout the book – covering not just jellyfish but stars, the universe, and the sterility of urine and sweat – but Suzy’s enthusiasm and curiosity invite the reader to gobble up the trivia too. The driving force behind Suzy’s quest is, we discover, ultimately guilt: she wants to find a ‘villain’ in the story, someone worse than her. A particularly poisonous type of jellyfish seems like an ideal target for a twelve-year-old girl trying to make sense of a world in which bad things can ‘just happen’.
Alongside the progression of her research, we see the flashbacks of her friendship with Franny, from its beginning until its ugly dissolution. Middle school, as Suzy’s elder brother constantly reminds her, is hell, and the particular cruelties of this age group are captured in Benjamin’s straightforward but elegant prose. It’s a time when childhood friendships can all too easily crack under the forces of changing interests and peer pressure – the desire to be cool, to fit in, to be like the other girls – and unlike many other explorations of this topic (I was reminded of Frances O’Roark Dowell’s The Secret Language of Girls and Mariah Fredericks’s The True Meaning of Cleavage), there’s no hope for reconciliation at the end of this.
The Truth About Jellyfish has been highly praised in the US since its release in the autumn; the hardback edition is on sale here already (and in March in the UK) with the e-book edition also available. The ideal reading range is ages ten to fourteen, with the usual caveat that a good book is a good book is a good book. Adults who adored RJ Palacio’s Wonder or Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me will love this, too.
