The Thing About Jellyfish

The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

“Jellyfish don’t get bogged down by drama, love, friendship, or sorrow. They don’t get stuck in any of the stuff that gets people in trouble…They drift past one another. They never stop moving, never stop pulsing through the depths.” --170

Essential points: Middle school would surely have felt threatening and lonesome enough for Suzy, heroine of The Thing About Jellyfish, if her childhood best friend Franny hadn’t drowned during the summer, leaving her so full of grief and regret that she simply stops speaking. Gentle, curious, blunt, and a bit of a misfit, Suzy is determined to find some reason for Franny’s death, something more concrete than “things just happening sometimes,” as adults are wont to say—perhaps if she can find a reason, this will help make up for the awful way things ended between the two once-best-friends. A sweet and lyrical book, The Thing About Jellyfish is chock-full of the realistic tortures and triumphs of middle school, scientific facts and principles, and the importance of forgiveness, communication, and resilience. Recommended for about grades six and up. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others will be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature!): Death; bullying.