“The Thing About Jellyfish” by Ali Benjamin

Ali Benjamin’s “The Thing About Jellyfish” is a delightful, poignant and thoroughly entertaining novel about a young girl’s strange, multilayered journey through grief. Told through the eyes of 12-year-old Suzanne, it is a story of imagination and wonder; friendship and betrayal; and the healing power of love. Although it’s written for ‘tweens, its message is one that will resonate just as strongly with adults.

The novel opens with Suzanne (her mom calls her “Zu”) vividly describing several species of jellyfish, among them the blood-red “Atolla” and the near-transparent moon jelly, “Aurelia aurita.” She tells the reader about their strange, pulsating movements, which look to the young girl like a beating heart — a “ghost heart,” she calls it, one you can “see right through into some other world, where everything you ever lost has gone to hide.”

Suzanne is a science geek and a math whiz, we learn early on. But she is also a young girl filled with pain and guilt. Soon after the story opens, we learn why. Suzanne’s best friend Franny recently drowned while on vacation in Maryland. Even more horribly, she died after she and Zu had a terrible falling out. (We don’t learn about the details until the story unfolds.) Suzanne is devastated, and she isn’t buying for one moment her mother’s explanation that “sometimes things just happen.” Franny was a great swimmer —  a natural in the water. She could not have simply drowned.

From there, Suzanne sets out to find out what really happened to her friend. While on a field trip to an aquarium with her 7th grade class, she wanders away from the group and encounters a jellyfish exhibit. Fascinated with the strangely beautiful invertebrates, she explores the tanks alone. Eventually, she comes upon a photo of a small jar in which a tiny, almost invisible jellyfish floats. It is a photo of the Irukandji jellyfish, whose venom is so toxic that its sting causes pain so excruciating that the victim becomes immobilized and — in some cases –begs to die. As Suzanne reads on, she learns that the Irukandji is native to Australia, but scientists believe it may have expanded its habitat to include parts of Europe, Japan and the United States.

And with that revelation, an idea is born.

A Strange Journey

Ali Benjamin
Credit: hatchettbookgroup.com

Throughout the rest of “The Thing About Jellyfish,” we learn about Franny and Suzanne’s friendship, which began when the duo was just five years old. Like all BFFs, the two are inseparable, sharing homework assignments and sleepovers, and even giving each other “rock star” personas while they lip-synch to their favorite songs. (Zu, with her untameable curly hair, is Miss Frizz, and Franny is Strawberry Girl, named for her long, straight strawberry blond locks.) Like prepubescent girls everywhere, they are happy and carefree, living in a world of their own making, interrupted only occasionally by things like chores, schoolwork and bothersome siblings.

Until middle school that is — that place where childhood collides with adolescence, and carefree friendships give way to hormones, peer pressure, “mean girls” and the all-consuming need to fit in.

Lest I reveal too much of the story, I will not go into the details of what happens as Suzanne continues her quest to make sense of her friend’s death. Suffice it to say it’s a strange journey, made quite a bit stranger by the fact that Zu, who was once such a chatterbox her mom called her a “constant-talker” has decided not to talk at all since Franny’s death. But it’s an interesting journey, too, filled with the intelligent musings of a girl whose tender age and inexperience eventually doom her crusade, but who, in her failure, discovers new strength and a new way to relate to the world.