Thirteen-year-old Sam Kepler Greyson is dealing with \u201cBig Things\u2122\u201d: His Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma is in remission, but his best friend, Oscar Padilla, recently died of brain cancer. When Sam returns to school, he\u2019s greeted with hostility\u2014thanks to a rumor spread by \u201cformer friend, current jerk\u201d Kevin Bellman, who claims that he lied about having cancer. Moreover, he\u2019s partnered with Cat Pellegrini\u2014whose clique peripherally includes Kevin\u2014for eighth grade\u2019s annual California History Project. To cope, Sam imagines Oscar giving him advice. Before his death, Oscar left Sam a message in their UFO notebook: \u201cWe are NOT alone in the universe.\u201d Sam finds an unlikely ally in Cat, who\u2019s secretly a fellow UFO enthusiast. As they investigate cryptic clues from a mysterious online contact, their friendship grows, and Sam finally feels like a normal kid\u2014a welcome relief from being treated as fragile or heroic. So how can he tell Cat about Oscar\u2014or the full story of his own cancer? And if Sam tells his moms about the bullying\u2014or the new pain in his chest\u2014how could life ever return to normal? While Bury, herself a cancer survivor, intricately explores Sam\u2019s conflicting emotions, Sam\u2019s occasionally wry narration and imagined banter with Oscar add levity, and his moms are heartwarmingly supportive. Sam and one of his moms are white and Jewish; his other mom is Black.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirteen-year-old Sam Kepler Greyson is dealing with \u201cBig Things\u2122\u201d: His Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma is in remission, but his best friend, Oscar Padilla, recently died of brain cancer. When Sam returns to school, he\u2019s greeted with hostility\u2014thanks to a rumor spread by \u201cformer friend, current jerk\u201d Kevin Bellman, who claims that he lied about having cancer. Moreover, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}