The Science of Breakable Things

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 1-Part 2, Chapters 2-6

Part 3, Chapters 7-9-Part 4, Chapters 10-14

Part 5, Chapters 15-21

Part 6, Chapters 22-31

Part 7, Chapters 32-41-Part 8, Chapter 42

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 1, Chapter 1-Part 2, Chapters 2-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Step 1: Observe”-Part 2: “Step 2: Question”

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Assignment 1: Observe Your Surroundings”

The protagonist, seventh-grader Natalie Napoli, is given a yearlong assignment by her highly enthusiastic new science teacher, Mr. Neely. The students must each choose a question to which they are dying to know the answer. In their lab notebooks, they are supposed to record notes, hypotheses, and observations about their questions, in addition to completing other class assignments. However, Natalie also uses the notebook to record notes about everything that is going on in her life. This creates the novel’s structure.

During class, Natalie writes about her overeager teacher and about a fellow student who annoys her, Mikayla Menzer. She also mentions that her mother is “sick,” so her family needs to tighten up its spending. Mr. Neely asks Natalie to pay attention during class, but she continues writing.

Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary: “Assignment 2: Questioning”

A few days later, Mr. Neely has students read their questions aloud in class. Natalie hadn’t chosen one yet, so she makes fun of the teacher’s usage of hashtags instead. This makes her best friend, Twig, laugh. Meanwhile, other students have real questions. The most impressive ones come from Dari, an annoyingly smart boy.

Natalie reports that her mother didn’t come out of her room for dinner again. Her mother used to do the cooking. Now that she is sick, Natalie helps her father prepare dinner, but when she wants to go get her mother for the meal, her father says she needs space. They eat in silence while Natalie reflects that the food would have been better if her mom had cooked it; her mom, who is a botanist, also would have helped her with her science project if she weren’t sick.

Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Assignment 3: Frogs”

Mr. Neely has the students dissect frogs in class. Mikayla and her friend Janie refuse to participate because of their belief in “animal rights.” Natalie explains that she doesn’t truly hate Mikayla, but she feels awkward around her because their mothers used to work together, and the girls were best friends when they were younger. Natalie and Twig find a fully intact grasshopper inside their frog’s stomach, and the other students get excited. Dari also seems a bit jealous.

Natalie calls her dad to ask if she can go to Twig’s house after school. At first, he says she should come home and stop avoiding the “situation” with her mother. Her dad says her mom is really sick, but Natalie thinks she just got bored with life. Natalie doesn’t want to “waste [her] time” being sad about it (19), plus she has homework to do. Her dad reluctantly agrees to let her go to Twig’s house, which is a mansion. Twig’s dad is a wealthy banker in New York; her parents are separated, but he sends them a lot of money. Twig’s mother also makes “a lot of money” designing apps (20), and she used to be a model. Twig never invites anyone else over because Natalie is her only friend. Twig loves board games, so the girls play a few rounds of Clue before Natalie insists they start their lab report.

Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Assignment 4: Plants Are People, Too”

In science class, the students are supposed to be filling out a worksheet about plants, but Natalie is writing in her journal instead. She hasn’t done much homework lately other than this journal, and her dad hasn’t pestered her about it because he assumes she’s upset about her mom.

Before Natalie’s mom got sick, she worked as a botanist in a lab at Lancaster University. She used to be passionate and full of wonder. Natalie thinks maybe she’s still “there” on the inside, like a dormant perennial plant, and she just needs something to help push her out again.

Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Assignment 5: Eggscellent”

Since Natalie hasn’t chosen a question yet, Mr. Neely suggests she participate in a local egg-drop competition, which Dari is also working on. Natalie takes the flyer but isn’t excited about the prospect of working with him. When she goes home, she reflects that the “old Mom” would have loved this project, but the old Mom disappeared.

Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Assignment 6: How to Grow a Miracle”

Natalie used to be allowed in her parents’ bedroom, but when her mom got sick over the summer, the door closed and stayed shut. The change in her mother happened slowly: She started sleeping more, working less, and wearing pajamas during the daytime. One day, Natalie realized she couldn’t remember the last time her mom laughed, and she knew something was “Not Okay.”

Natalie sneaks into her parents’ room while her mother is sleeping to get her book about the miraculous cobalt blue orchids. She enjoys reading it because her mother wrote it when she was excited about science, life, and questions, as if she were writing a fairy tale.

Part 1, Chapter 1-Part 2, Chapters 2-6 Analysis

Natalie’s central dilemma is introduced through the novel’s structure: Her science teacher gives her an opportunity to “open up” by exploring a question scientifically and writing about it, but Natalie is hesitant to reveal her thoughts and feelings to anyone, including herself, because it’s too painful and confusing. She struggles with choosing a burning question to investigate, although she already knows what she’s wondering about, because she can’t formulate the question properly. Ironically, she ends up investigating the question anyway through the process of science. Although she picks a different question for class, focusing on the egg drop, the journal ends up being much more about depression and its far-reaching impact than about her experiment.

This section introduces Natalie’s ongoing metaphor of plants as people. Perhaps because her mother is a botanist, Natalie gravitates toward plants as a way to explain her mother’s illness. Perennial plants seem to die in winter but are merely dormant and bloom again after a season of rest. Natalie thinks that perhaps her mother is currently dormant, waiting for something like sunlight or spring to arrive so she can thrive again. This gives Natalie hope that perhaps there is a cure for mother’s condition and contributes to the novel’s emerging idea that people can be simultaneously strong and fragile.

At the beginning of the novel, Natalie tends to view people as having different versions of themselves that they switch between. She isn’t sure whether these transitions are always reversible. For example, her father sometimes becomes “Therapist Dad,” but he easily switches back to normal. On the other hand, her mom is “not-Mom,” just like her old friend, Mikayla, became “not-Mikayla.” Natalie worries about whether her regular mother will return.

Although Natalie recognizes that her mom is “Not Okay,” she does not yet realize that her mother has depression, nor does she share her feelings about the changes in her family dynamic with anyone. She grows apart from both Twig and her father, and she hesitates to make new friends. In this section, she participates in observation and questioning, the first steps of the scientific method. She records symptoms and discusses when they began. She also records the changes in both her and her father’s behavior since the onset of her mother’s unnamed problem. The effects of depression on others, not only on the person who has it, will remain a major focus throughout the book.

At first, one way that Natalie struggles to “open up” is toward herself. It is difficult for her to even admit that she cares about her mother’s problems. At first, she feels that since her mom gave up on her, she should give up on her mother. Finally admitting that she cares enough about her mother to investigate whether her problem has a solution marks the first major step in Natalie’s healing process, and her information-gathering supports this development.