Displaced Planet! A Place for Pluto by Stef Wade

FOR THE BETTER PART OF FOREVER, PLUTO WAS A PLANET.

Poor Pluto! He's a displaced person (er, planet).

After hanging out with the big boy planets for nearly a century, Pluto has just gotten a disturbing memo: He's been downgraded from the Platinum Planet Class.

After being one of the Big Nine, a prestigious elite, since 1930, suddenly Pluto finds he's out of the loop. Really.

To be a planet, the astronomers declared, a body has to have three characteristics:

It is in orbit around the Sun.
It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).
It has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.

And although Pluto has faithfully orbited the sun for ages, and although he is sortasphere-ish (Okay, so some of us have a few bulges in the wrong places!), it seems he isn't quite weighty enough to "clear" his orbit of other bodies.

Pluto is miffed. Hey! No collision! he argues. And he's got five moons! That's way better than Earth can do! Pluto feels he's been unfairly unfriended by the whole solar system!

With his faithful moons in tow, Pluto sets out to find somebody to hang around the sun with.

HIS FRIEND HALLEY'S COMET STREAKED PAST.

"HAVEN'T SEEN YOU IN A WHILE," PLUTO SAID.

"YEAH, I GET THAT A LOT," SAID THE COMET.

But Halley's Comet has his long tail. Pluto doesn't have any tail, so he can't be a comet. The meteorites look like they are having a high old time trying to strike the Earth, but Pluto still feels like Earth is his relative, not his target. Maybe he can find friends in the asteroid belt. He hails Ida the Asteroid, who points out that he's just not rocky enough for their group. He's a total misfit!

NO ONE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS A MATCH FOR PLUTO.

But, wait! There is another kind of body in the loop!

IT WAS LIKE LOOKING AT HIMSELF IN A MIRROR!

And they have their own group--The DWARF PLANETS. Haumesa, MakeMake, Ceres, and Eris recognize Pluto as one of them, in Stef Wade's sly story of solar system social groups, A Place for Pluto (Capstone Editions) (Capstone Press, 2018). There is plenty of humorous solar system back-and-forth banter, along with some solid science in this story of poor Pluto, the cast-off planet who sets out to find his new place in space. Stef Wade's clever picture book combines social awareness with astronomy, an unusual combination that works well in the case of the Pluto, the un-planet, especially in the guise of the usual social suspects in artist Melanie Demmer's clever cartoons of the in-groups of the solar system. Wade also appends an informational afterword, "What's the Deal with Pluto," that fills young readers in on Pluto's solar system history. Says Kirkus Reviews, "Make space for this clever blend of science and self-realization."