Chasing Orion by Kathryn Lasky

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Chasing Orion by Kathryn Lasky

392 pages

Wow! Super heavy book for juvenile fiction! Usually I have read book that have two or three conflicts. This books was chock full...almost too full.

1. The next door neighbor girl is in an iron lung. Georgie seriously wants the approval of this true beauty, but she expects she may be evil.

2. Georgie has a new friend after moving to a new neighborhood. But she is really weird, and she wonders if she will be cast as weird too.

3. Georgie doubts there is a God. But she thinks about him all the time.

4. Georgie's favorite person is her older brother, but she is losing him to the iron lung girl.

5. There family has very little money, and they are worried about scholarships, but she has plenty of money to do these amazing dioramas, or Little Worlds.

6. Georgie is meticulously checking herself for polio, but is constantly bored out of her mind wishing she could go to the movies or the pool, which in 1952 Indiana is almost a death wish.

7. They make all these improvements on the iron lung during this time, but is it morally wrong to invent a contraption to prolong a miserable life.

In all honesty, I found this book crowded and chaotic, just too much all at once, although it did peak my interest in the polio epidemic. I actually found myself going online looking for more information. They even had iron lungs in which women could give birth to babies.