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Description
A meteorite comes crashing down on the lives of three middle schoolers changing everything they know about family, friendships, and community in this charming and heartfelt novel with a light STEM touch.
The space rock is just the latest thing to land, uninvited, in Vega Lucero’s road-stop hometown. But when she discovers how much a chunk of the meteorite might be worth, she realizes it’s exactly the treasure she’s been hoping to find—and maybe a way to convince her mom not to sell the family store to big city developers to help pay for her grandpa Tata’s medical expenses.
Determined to find more pieces of the sky somewhere in the perilous desert wilderness, stubbornly independent Vega must set aside her distrust of outsiders to team up with Jasper, a would-be rival—and her own tagalong cousin Mila—on an overnight adventure to find more meteorites before the professional hunters who have descended on Date City do. But along the way, she realizes that she’s not the only one with the weight of the world on her shoulders. Jasper and Mila have secrets and worries of their own that has brought them on this journey.
Together, this ragtag group will battle against coyotes, a flood, and scorpions. But what they will ultimately discover is that no treasure is big enough to prevent unwelcome change. Only family and friends can help weather the unexpected that life brings.
Book Club Guide
- Vega’s Piece of the Sky is told from Vega’s first-person perspective, as well as Mila and Jasper’s third-person perspectives. How does having these three different perspectives shape your understanding of the story? Which character did you most relate to?
- Why are Vega and Jasper so desperate to find the meteorite?
- What do you think the meteorite—a rock that has come to earth from space—represents to the three main characters?
- Mila and Jasper make an agreement that whoever sees the meteorite first gets to keep it. Is that fair? How does this agreement affect how they work together as a team?
- How does Mila and Vega’s relationship change as they hunt for the meteorite?
- Mila loves looking at stars and reading about astronomy. How does this interest help her and Vega find their way back to the trail?
- Vega is very close with Tata, but she knows that after his fall, he isn’t the same as he was before. How is she handling this change?
- In chapter 24, we discover that Jasper did something to help Vega, even though it could potentially upset his father. What did Jasper do and why do you think he did it?
- How does Jasper’s relationship with his father change throughout the book?
- Why do you think this book is called Vega’s Piece of the Sky?
