Orbiting Jupiter Study Guide

Gary D. Schmidt was born in Hicksville, NY in 1957. He double-majored in English and political science at Gordon College, from which he graduated in 1979. He received an M.A. in English in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Medieval Language and Literature in 1985, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Shortly after receiving his Ph.D., he took a job as an English professor at Calvin College, a Christian college in Grand Rapids, MI. He still teaches at Calvin College, where he is now a professor emeritus. Since 2007, he has also taught in the MFA Program in Writing for Children at Hamline University, one of only three MFAs in the U.S. that specializes in writing fiction for children. He published his first novel, The Sin Eater, in 1996. Since then, he has published many notable books for children and young adults, including Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (2004), a Newbery Honor Book in 2005, and The Wednesday Wars (2007), a Newbery Honor medalist and a nominee for the Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Award. In addition to writing novels and teaching at universities, Schmidt has also taught classes in prisons and juvenile detention centers, volunteer work that informed his 2015 novel Orbiting Jupiter (2015), one of whose main characters spends time in a violent juvenile detention center.

The federal agency that oversees U.S. foster care, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, was created in 1912 by President William Howard Taft. Each state also has a state agency that oversees foster care within its jurisdiction. As of 2021, there were more than 390,000 children in U.S. foster care. Though people may assume that most foster children are placed with non-relative foster parents—as Joseph Brook is placed with the Hurd family in Orbiting Jupiter—a non-relative foster home was the most recent placement for less than half (44 percent) of U.S. foster children in 2021. Another 35% lived in a relative foster home—that is, with biological relatives who are not their parents. 4% lived in a group home and 5 percent lived in an institution. In Orbiting Jupiter, Joseph Brook lives in both before the Maine foster care system places him with the Hurds. Notably, Joseph is somewhat older than average for foster care: the average age of a child entering foster care in 2021 was about six years old, and about one in five of all children entering foster care were—like Joseph’s daughter Jupiter—less than one year old.

In Orbiting Jupiter, 14-year-old Joseph Brook is shown reading four books. Two are young adult novels: M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (2008), and its sequel, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. II: The Kingdom on the Waves (2009). These YA novels are historical fiction about a Black boy experimented on by white researchers during the Revolutionary War period. They trenchantly represent American racism and racist pseudoscience in a narrative for young readers. Orbiting Jupiter may have been inspired by the Octavian Nothing novels’ treatment of social prejudice against Black people in its depiction of social prejudice against children caught up in the U.S. foster care system and juvenile justice system. The other two books Joseph reads are Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), nonfiction works containing nature descriptions of New England. Other contemporary young adult novels with protagonists involved in the child welfare system include Robin Benway’s Far from the Tree (2019), about a girl named Grace who was adopted out of the foster care system but whose biological brother remained in it, and Jennifer Longo’s What I Carry (2020), about a girl named Muir about to age out of the foster system,