The Probability of Everything
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“One of the best books I have read this year (maybe ever).” —Colby Sharp, Nerdy Book Club
NPR Books We Love 2023 | Publishers Weekly Best of 2023 | Winner of the Governor General's Literary Awards for Young People's Literature
A heart-wrenching middle grade debut about Kemi, an aspiring scientist who loves statistics and facts, as she navigates grief and loss at a moment when life as she knows it changes forever.
Eleven-year-old Kemi Carter loves scientific facts, specifically probability. It's how she understands the world and her place in it. Kemi knows her odds of being born were 1 in 5.5 trillion and that the odds of her having the best family ever were even lower. Yet somehow, Kemi lucked out.
But everything Kemi thought she knew changes when she sees an asteroid hover in the sky, casting a purple haze over her world. Amplus-68 has an 84.7% chance of colliding with earth in four days, and with that collision, Kemi’s life as she knows it will end.
But over the course of the four days, even facts don’t feel true to Kemi anymore. The new town she moved to that was supposed to be “better for her family” isn’t very welcoming. And Amplus-68 is taking over her life, but others are still going to school and eating at their favorite diner like nothing has changed. Is Kemi the only one who feels like the world is ending?
With the days numbered, Kemi decides to put together a time capsule that will capture her family’s truth: how creative her mother is, how inquisitive her little sister can be, and how much Kemi's whole world revolves around her father. But no time capsule can change the truth behind all of it, that Kemi must face the most inevitable and hardest part of life: saying goodbye.
"My heart hurt as I raced through the last chapters of this unique book that shines a light on family, friends, grief, and love." —Lisa Yee, author of Maizy Chen's Last Chance
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After learning that an asteroid is set to destroy Earth, a sixth grader builds a time capsule to commemorate her family in this pensive read from Everett (How to Live Without You). With her parents and younger sister Lo, 11-year-old Nigerian American Kemi Carter, an aspiring scientist obsessed with probability statistics, makes up one of the few Black families living in a predominantly white neighborhood. And despite some tension with a prejudiced neighbor, Kemi feels that she has a pretty good life with a loving family. So when she learns that there's an 84.7% chance that Earth will be destroyed in four days by asteroid Amplus-68, Kemi determines to collect her family members' "most important stuff, the things we love most," to create a time capsule, hoping that their memory will survive even after they're gone. But as her family and friends go about their lives, Kemi feels as if she's the only person taking their seemingly imminent demise—and her time capsule—seriously. Kemi's astute voice resonates with a deep love and loyalty for her family, rendering her insistence in honoring them and subsequent narrative reveals as heartrending, hopeful, and palpably felt. Ages 8–12.
