We chat with author Jill Tew about Rayana Johnson’s Giant Leap, which is hilarious and heartfelt middle-grade novel about a STEM loving Black girl finding her place in the universe again after her first period knocks her out of orbit. PLUS you can check out an excerpt at the end of the interview!
Hi, Jill! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m Jill, I write dystopian romance and middle grade contemporary stories that imagine Black girls in new worlds. I’m a mom, a proud nerd and a terrible crocheter.
(And yes, I did go to Space Camp!)
Your latest novel, Rayana Johnson’s Giant Leap, is out April 21st! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Anxious Black girl @ Space Camp
(When you say @ instead of “at” it doesn’t count as a word. It’s science.)
What can readers expect?
Rayana believes that if she plans her life well enough, she’ll be able to foresee every possible obstacle. But then a whole bunch of unforeseen challenges hit at once while she’s away at Space Camp: she gets her first period; her parents start fighting… like, a lot; and her bestie Kaya is acting really distant. Ray has to learn that sometimes the most meaningful missions are the ones it’s impossible to plan for.
Ray has been absolutely hilarious since she first came on the page as the main character’s bestie in my middle grade debut, Kaya Morgan’s Crowning Achievement, so definitely expect lots of laughs. There’s also a lot of space camp fun: space travel history, model rocket contests, laser tag capture-the-flag, and mission simulations. I hope that by the end of the book, readers who have never been to Space Camp will feel like they’ve spent some time there.
Where did the inspiration for Rayana Johnson’s Giant Leap come from?
I was the responsible kid, from a young age, and it took me a long time to realize that a lot of my preparedness actually came from anxiety about all of the ways something could end in disaster (which it almost never did). And then my parents announced they were getting divorced, which actually was a disaster, and to me, anyway, came out of nowhere.
Middle grade is that age where you start to realize that life is a lot more complicated than you’ve been told, and you start to be let in on more adult situations. Rayana’s parents’ divorce really shakes her up, because it’s like– what else don’t I know? I wanted to tell a story about a kid who thinks they’ve got this “growing up” thing all figured out, and what happens when they have to face the unexpected.
As for Space Camp, it was the coolest! I was part of mission control for my team’s final simulation, and I still remember that experience fondly.
What do you hope readers take away from Rayana Johnson’s Giant Leap?
I hope that readers who identify with Ray’s anxiety realize that they don’t have to have it all together all the time. That the people who care about them don’t just care about them because they’re “responsible” or “easy”. It’s okay to not have a plan for everything, and you can lean on your loved ones until you’re back on your feet. That’s what they’re there for.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I have been extremely lucky to receive an early copy of my friend Jordan Ifueko’s middle grade debut, The Genie Game, and obsessed doesn’t even begin to cover it. In YA, dystopian books are my bread and butter, and to see the way Jordan introduces concepts like mass consumerism and hypercapitalism to a middle grade audience is truly inspired.
In YA, my friend Clare Edge’s Natural Selection is coming out, and I can’t wait for the world to discover this book. It’s a speculative thriller with a twist that is so deliciously satisfying, and I blew through the whole book in like two days.
EXCERPT
I love all of my checklists, but this morning’s list might be the most important one I’ve ever made. Because right now, Kaya and I are doing the final checks for my ten-day stay at Galaxy Camp, a sleepaway camp located at the National Center for Space and Rocketry in Woodsboro, Alabama. The camp is designed for kids from age nine all the way to eighteen, who are interested in learning more about space exploration. Even some legit astronauts went to Galaxy Camp as kids. It’s a place to do fun science experiments, see space shuttles up close and personal, and even practice a real-life space mission in life-size shuttle replicas. In other words, my dream. So needless to say, I’ve been thinking about this packing list all summer, adding things to it as different imagined scenarios pop into my head. What if it rains? Poncho. What if I make a bunch of new friends and they want to do karaoke? Pocket- size Bluetooth-enabled microphone. What if my new friends want to do karaoke in the rain?
Hmm. Better bring a Ziplock bag for the microphone. Just in case.
“Lucky hoodie?” Kaya asks, just as my mom walks in my room.
Mom freezes. “Shoot, I knew I forgot something! Ray baby, I think it might still be in the washer from last night.” She winces, like she’s afraid of letting me down.
“Pshh, who do you think you’re talking to?” I hop onto my bed and roll to the other side, picking up a basket of still-warm laundry. “I checked first thing this morning and ran the dryer myself.”
Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I swear both Kaya and Mom’s shoulders drop about two inches each. Kaya lifts the packing list again. “Lucky hoodie?” she asks with a smile.
I hold my hoodie out at arm’s length, taking in the black fabric with names listed down the front in bold white, letters—Katherine & Robert & Guy & Mae & Leland. My daddy bought me the hoodie last year, after driving through Alabama on his way back from a work conference. The names on it all belong to famous Black people who paved the way in space exploration. There’s Katherine Johnson, of Hidden Figures fame, a mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics made the first American crewed spaceflights possible. Robert Lawrence was selected to be the first Black pilot on a space shuttle mission, even though he sadly died in a fighter jet crash before he got to go to space. The title for the first African American to go to space then went to Guy Bluford, in 1983. Since then, Guy’s received so many medals and awards, I bet you need to put on sunglasses before you walk into his house.
Almost ten years later, Mae Jemison made it clear that girls run the world when she became the first African American woman to go to space in 1992. And finally, most recently, Leland Melvin proved that we contain multitudes when he started off as a professional football player for the Dallas Cowboys, then turned around and became an astronaut, logging over five hundred hours in space. My favorite accomplishment of Leland’s, though, is that he successfully snuck his dogs Jake and Scout into the Johnson Space Center for a photo shoot. I have that picture of Leland and his dogs framed on my wall, along with my favorite quote, from Mae Jemison herself: “Sometimes people want to limit you because of their own imaginations.”
I pull the hoodie over my head, relaxing into the smell of Mom’s spring rain fabric softener and the knowledge that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.
“Lucky hoodie: check!” I say triumphantly.
