48 pages • 1 hour read
Christina LiClues to the Universe
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Science of Living
The science of living is a combination of scientific principles and discoveries that make up one’s life. Ro is a scientist by nature, as her father was before her, and she is particularly curious about space and the possibilities that exist out there. She loves to explore the unknown, ask difficult questions, and methodically plan out her life. After Ro’s father died, she was left trying to reconfigure her life and her perception of the world, knowing now that not everything goes the way she plans. She finds there is no guide or rulebook for how to deal with grief and loss, noting:
I knew what all the details were, but this time the details weren’t enough for me. It didn’t explain why an average person lived to be sixty-seven years old and Dad didn’t get twenty-two of them. The police never told me how to finish sixth grade or spend a summer with a black hole growing in my chest (51).
Her analytical approach to grief is representative of her personality, as she is trying to view death and change through the lens of research and data. Because Ro is a scientist in everything she does, she is constantly considering what makes a good scientist and how she can be one. She reflects on lessons her dad taught her, like “Dad always said that a good scientist made observations” (13). Ro constantly observes the world, largely because she is quiet and keeps to herself.
When Ro and Benji start working together, their first project is a Rube Goldberg machine that works perfectly with both of their help. It is appropriate foreshadowing for how these two friends come together to help one another understand themselves and confront what is holding each of them back. Benji helps Ro with her rocket, which seems to fail at each launch, and Ro must come to grips with the fact that her plan is not going as she hoped. This frustrates her and makes her feel as if she’s failing to honor her father’s memory, as she thinks, “I saw the world the way he saw it: through numbers and reason. For every unknown there was supposed to be an exact solution, if only you did the steps right” (152). At the same time, Benji struggles to speak up for himself and fears the prospect of meeting his father, but he ends up doing both of these things and reflects on how his life has navigated him to this point. Together, Ro and Benji discover the beauty of failure and the power of second chances. Ro comes to the realization that science is a process of trial and error, and failures often lead to success if a person is willing to learn from them. She reinforces the importance of curiosity in the search for life’s meaning. Finally, Ro accepts that she cannot know the answers to everything, and sometimes the process of finding out is more important than the result.
Finding Meaning in the Face of Loss
Ro’s story is carved around the experience of her father’s death and the process of grief and healing that follows. Ro is 12 years old and only just starting to figure out the world and her place within it. She feels lost and without a clear direction after her father’s death and wants desperately to find a way to honor him. Because Ro only settles for the best, she decides that she will shoot a rocket filled with her dad’s belongings into space to effectively immortalize his memory and give him something he was never able to experience himself. Ro’s father wanted to be an astronaut but could not, and his love for space exploration is what Ro remembers most about him. Like the Voyager probes that were sent into space with the hope of one day being discovered, Ro is filled with hope about her project and what finishing the rocket that she and her father started would mean to her.
Ro and Benji begin working together, and Ro adopts Benji’s goal of finding his father. She begins focusing on both problems equally until they are solved, and Benji even feels at times like she is taking over. Ro hates the feeling of disappointment and failure when her rocket doesn’t work as planned, or when Benji buses to LA on his own, but this only propels her to keep trying. Benji most admires Ro because she aims for the impossible, and this pursuit is what gives Ro meaning in her life. At the same time, she carries the grief of her father’s loss with her everywhere. Nothing she does seems to lift it, and “sometimes I wondered if people were meant to walk around with craters in their hearts for the rest of their lives” (130). Ro ends up finding an unexpected friend in Mr. Voltz because they are both going through the process of grief, and while these are small changes, they are significant sources of healing during the most painful time. Eventually, Ro realizes that she cannot bring her father back or solve the mystery of why he died, accepting that she is powerless to change it or to figure out why she now must live her life without him. She finds meaning in her friendship with Benji and in her desire to seek out answers to life’s biggest and most difficult questions.
Friendship and Its Power to Inspire
Friendship has the power to inspire change, growth, and new ideas and experiences. It is at the center of adolescence, as children start to mature, discover who they are, and learn how to navigate relationships with different types of people. Ro and Benji start out as two strangers who happen to sit next to each other and mix up their folders one day, but this mistake turns out to be the catalyst for a long-lasting and powerful friendship. Ro and Benji appear to be opposites on the surface, as Benji likes chaos and creativity while Ro likes order, science, and logic. Under the surface, however, both Benji and Ro have a longing for purpose, direction, and meaning. They use their differences to work together and help one another, and their similarities bond them further.
Ro can’t figure out how to make her rocket work, and while Benji can’t necessarily help in this regard, he offers moral support that encourages Ro to keep trying and to celebrate successes that she feels are failures. Benji and Ro make a deal to help each other because it’s mutually beneficial, but they ultimately end up helping because they want to and because they care about each other. Being around Ro inspires Benji to stand up for himself more, confront his bully, and take the bold leap to go see his father. Benji also develops an appreciation for scientific discovery after watching Ro build her rocket. Benji inspires Ro as well by giving her a larger purpose to fight for in finding his father and showing Ro that it’s okay to be goofy or to exist in the unknown. Building Ro’s rocket is like a real-life space adventure, which reminds Ro of her father and Benji of his. Together, they accomplish the impossible. In the story’s conclusion, Ro considers whether she might be developing feelings for Benji, but still feels too young to become involved in that way. Instead, she is just grateful to have a best friend: “For now, Benji and I were just people who split milkshakes and paid for each other’s fries, who would drive all the way to Los Angeles to rescue the other […] Who built rockets together and read comic books and shared Red Vines and told each other everything” (264). Benji comes to view Ro as a personal hero because she always aims for greatness and never shies away from being herself. The comic he creates for her is a symbol of these feelings of admiration and symbolic of how their friendship has been the biggest point of inspiration in his life.
