Hello, Universe

Four middle schoolers whose lives would otherwise never intersect converge over a single day in this novel, which moves between their perspectives chapter by chapter. Virgil Salinas is a shy Filipino American boy who carries his grandmother's stories and superstitions with him and struggles to work up the courage to talk to Valencia Somerset, a deaf classmate who spends her days journaling and exploring the woods near her house rather than trying to fit in with hearing classmates who make little effort to understand her. Kaori Tanaka, a self styled psychic who has taken Virgil on as an occasional client, and her younger sister Gen round out the cast, while Chet Bullens, a bully nursing his own private humiliations at home, sets the day's crisis in motion when he snatches Virgil's backpack, with his pet guinea pig Gulliver inside, and drops it down an abandoned well; Virgil climbs down after it and cannot get back out. Valencia, Kaori, and Gen piece together where Virgil has gone and organize a rescue, while Virgil, trapped in the dark with Gulliver and genuinely afraid for the first time in the book, works through the stories his grandmother told him about courage rather than simply waiting to be saved. By the time Virgil is finally pulled free, the day's separate threads, Kaori's belief in fate, Valencia's isolation, Chet's own fear of his father, have pulled the four kids into something closer to real friendship than any of them expected that morning.

Kelly writes each character's voice distinctly enough that the rotating viewpoints never blur together, and the book moves quickly, driven by real suspense once Virgil falls, while still making room for quieter chapters about loneliness and family expectation. It suits readers who like an ensemble cast and a satisfying, occasionally almost too neatly resolved ending, and its grounding in Filipino folklore, carried mainly through Virgil's grandmother, gives the book a specific cultural texture beyond its central rescue plot.