The Science of Breakable Thing by Tae Keller

Newbery Award-winning author of When You Trap a Tiger

I finished this book at 2025 December. This was our class’ selected book for that year. We had so much fun reading this book. I thought this book was about science, but there is science mixed into the story.

This book is about a girl name Natalie with her other two best friends and a mom who has a depression. Natalie, does know that mom has a depression but she wants to heal her depression. Her mother is a botanist so her mother studies about this flower called the Cobalt Blue Orchid. Natalie thinks the reason why mother got her depression is because the Cobalt Blue Orchid project failed. That is the reason why Natalie decides to join the Egg Drop competition and use the prize rise money to go to New Mexico, and show her mother the flowers. Natalie’s’ two best friends help her. But unfortunately they do not win the competition and finds another way to “heal” her depression. Later almost at the end of the story her parents reveal everything to Natalie and the truth about her mother’s depression.

I will tell you one of my favorite quotes in the book, most of them are funny, so our class burst out laughing. My preferred quote is what Twig one of Natalie’s best friend. “I stole my mom’s credit card,” Twig explained. “We can go to the airport and buy plane tickets, and we’ll bring an orchid back for your mom.” The reason that this is my preferred quote is is that our class being entertained exceedingly.

Some of the major characters are Natalie, Mom, Dad, Twig, Dari, Mr. Neely. Character that I didn’t introduce yet are Dad, Dari, and Mr. Neely. Dad is Natalie’s dad, he is a therapist and tries to comfort Natalie, but during, in Natalie’s vision he is not doing a very good job. Dari is another one of Natalie’s best friend, in the book Natalie describes him as “new kid slash genius.” Lastly, Mr. Neely is Natalie’s science teacher and he is the teacher who suggests Natalie to join the Egg Drop Contest.

One big lesson that I learned as I was reading the book, was “As it turns out, you can’t always protect breakable things. Hearts and eggs will break, and everything changes, but you keep going anyway. Because science is asking questions. And living is not being afraid of the answer.” This is a quote that is in the last page of the book and even though it is not my personal favorite quote, I think I can say it is the most meaningful quote in the book. It tells an significant lesson in life. You just have to keep going even though something breaks.

There are 42 chapters and the book has 292 pages, but I didn’t think it was a lot to read. There are some pictures but none of the pictures are colored and lots of the pictures are the sketches of their egg drop layout format. I think this book can be read at beginning of fifth grade of the end of fourth grade. The Lexile level for Science of Breakable Things is consistently reported as 840L.