Editorial Content for Watch the Sky

Jory Birch has always been told to watch for Signs. Signs could be a meteor shower in the sky, a newspaper splattered with white paint, a little girl found in the pumpkin patch. Caleb, Jory’s step-father, is a self-professed expert in Signs and knows they herald an oncoming danger that the family must protect themselves from. To prepare for this unseen danger, he enlists the family’s help in digging a large tunnel in the giant canyon outside their farmhouse. With each hole Jory begins to dig, he feels himself questioning their way of life and wanting to break free. But how can he when family means everything and disobeying Caleb might be a matter of life or death?

Coming in at only 262 pages, it would seem like WATCH THE SKY is a novel you could read quickly. Some could probably devour it in one sitting. But I think Kristen Hubbard’s middle-grade debut requires more than that. WATCH THE SKY is a novel that unravels slowly, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that you should probably take your time with it, like Jory, our protagonist, takes his time understanding the world around him.

I was impressed with how Jory grew over the course of the book and I think future readers will be, too.

I admired Jory’s strength in all this. I think everyone can understand the consequences of keeping a secret. But Jory has so many. He can’t tell anyone about his sister, Kit, who doesn’t speak and who appeared one day in the garden. He can’t tell anyone about the tunnel the family is digging in the canyon or that they’re stockpiling goods. There really isn’t much that Jory can say to his classmates and teachers, and he’s very isolated because of it. Despite all of that, he remains loyal to his family and protective of them, especially Kit. He’s extremely intelligent and it’s so frustrating that he’s not able to showcase this more. He has to hide behind the signs, rather than performing in school and doing his work.

As frustrating as all of that is, readers will be too engrossed to let go. They’ll want to stick with the novel to see what the signs mean. They’ll want to find out where Kit came from and if Jory can balance this family and friends and the secrets in between.

I must admit, I kept waiting for a big twist ending or epic reveal and I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that that’s not what the novel is about at all. At its heart, it’s about self-discovery. Jory is only a kid, but he has the weight of his family’s secrets on his shoulders and the worry that any wrong move could bring negative attention to his family. Caleb always talks about the Officials and how Jory and his siblings could be taken away from his parents. So he keeps his head down at school, just scraping by and never making a friend. The paradigm shift comes when a plucky fellow classmate takes notice of him and he has no other choice but to talk to her. It’s only then that he starts to come out of his shell and realize that there’s so much more to the world than waiting for Signs of danger to pop up.

I also think it’s fair to say that you don’t have to fall in love with a book right away. Like the narrative, my love for this book unfolded over time and was slow to come. But the prose is so lovely and the truths in Jory’s reflections are so fitting. I was impressed with how Jory grew over the course of the book and I think future readers will be, too.

I don’t have many criticisms for this book except to say that it reads a bit unfinished. There was so much more to the story that I wanted and a lot was left unsaid. But I felt that Jory’s journey and self-realization was complete. He had always been strong, but at the end of the novel he used that strength when it mattered for his family. I really appreciated this quiet and beautiful novel and I hope that many other readers will, as well.