The Thing About Jellyfish

This page contains affiliate links, and we may receive compensation if you click on a link. You can read my full advertising disclosure HERE.

Manufacturer: Ali Benjamin
Brand: Fiction/Children’s Literature
Brew: Hardback
Steeping Time: 334 pages
Tea Service: Personal Choice
Rating:

Synopsis: “Suzy Swanson has always known things that others don’t. She can explain the sleep patterns of ants. She knows there are 150 million jellyfish stings on the planet every year, and she knows that the average middle school kid contains about 20 billion of Shakespeare’s atoms. But she can’t understand how Franny Jackson’s lifetime could be cut so short…before Suzy could make up for the worst thing she’d ever done to her friend.

As Suzy retreats into a silent world of her imagination, she finds that the universe won’t allow her escape into her grief. Astonishing wonders are all around her…as are the love and hope she desperately needs to forgive herself. This achingly heartfelt debut explores the defining moment in each of our lives when we first realize that not all stories have happy endings…but that brand-new stories are waiting to bloom, sometimes right in our own backyards.”

I found this book while digging through a huge bin of books at a thrift store.

Something about it caught my attention, and as a result, it ended up on one of my bookshelves at home. A few years later, I found myself looking for something easy, maybe a bit light, to read after The Alice Network and before All The Light We Cannot See, two heavy WWII novels. The Thing About Jellyfish caught my attention. What I expected was an easy read from a book aimed at 4-8th graders. I got a life lesson instead.

Suzy is your typical kid. Except that she isn’t talking right now. To anyone. At all. And she doesn’t have many friends. Or any, for that matter. She had one best friend, but now Franny Jackson is gone, and Suzy is left with the crushing guilt of hurting her friend and then not having the chance to make things right. We meet Suzy a few weeks into 7th grade, which is perhaps a month after Franny Jackson’s funeral.

I really enjoyed the layout of this book. We follow Suzy through her present-day life, and as we do, we get flashbacks that slowly explain her friendship with Franny and, finally, the horrible thing that Suzy did. The book is broken up into parts. Each part starts with a step in the scientific method and a quote from her science teacher. These steps and quotes are a silent guide for Suzy as she searches to make sense of Franny’s death.

Suzy is a smart girl, full of random facts that she thinks are interesting.

She and Franny have always had each other’s backs, but in the 6th grade, their friendship starts to change. Franny starts taking more care in her appearance and begins to form friendships with the popular girls. Suzy tries to follow in Franny’s footsteps but ultimately is left behind because she’s the ‘weird girl.’ She doesn’t fit in with any other groups and is trying to make sense of why her only friend no longer wants to be around her.

After Franny drowns during a beach vacation, Suzy is left trying to figure out why Franny died. Her mom explains it by saying, “Sometimes things just happen,” but this isn’t good enough for Suzy. After a visit to the aquarium on a school field trip, Suzy latches onto the idea that Franny must have been stung by an Irukandji jellyfish. As a result, Suzy spends every waking minute learning all she can about jellyfish and how one of them might have taken the life of her best friend.

This book hit home far more than I expected it to.

It touches on something that everyone will go through at some point in their life: the loss of a friendship. It dredged up my own painful memories of losing my best friend towards the tail end of high school. She didn’t die, thank goodness, but our friendship fractured in high school and then shattered beyond repair a few years after graduation. It’s been eleven years and it still causes a dull, physical ache in my chest when I think about it. This book brought all of those memories back, but it also reminded me of the benefit of letting go and moving on. Staying in that place of grief and heartache isn’t healthy or helpful. Yes, you should take time to grieve, but eventually, you have to push through that and continue living. We get to follow Suzy through this beautiful story as she learns the same lesson.

This book is a swift read. I finished it in two days (while I could have finished it in one sitting, it was almost midnight and Responsible Lydia had work the next morning). I laughed, I cried, I celebrated, I dwelled on past hurts for a little while. And then I kissed our three sweet cats goodnight and climbed into bed with my husband. Life can be good if you choose for it to be. This book reminded me of that. Forgiveness, compassion, and love are strong themes throughout The Thing About Jellyfish, and sometimes we need the reminder to have those things for ourselves as well.

I honestly thought this would be a book in which I’d possibly learn a few interesting facts about jellyfish.

I didn’t expect to be taught and reminded of an important life lesson.

I’d recommend this book to anyone and everyone of all ages.

Have you read The Thing About Jellyfish? Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about it! Want to read it? Click here to get a copy.
Cheers,
Lydia