Author Christopher Edge once said that when ‘you open the pages of a book you step into a parallel universe’.
This is what we all hope for when we choose a new title for our class; to whisk them away from the stress of exams, to open their minds – and The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day certainly delivers.
Even more than that, it transports at the speed of light.
This is the story of Maisie, a gifted 10 year old already studying for a degree in mathematics and physics at the Open University.
All she wants for her birthday are the things she needs to build a nuclear reactor; but instead she wakes up to an empty house, and outside the front door is a terrible, all-consuming blackness.
Trapped in this ever-shifting reality, Maisie needs to use the laws of the universe – and the love of her family – to survive.
From the theory of relativity and gravity, to the complexity of time and space and the concept of infinity, Christopher Edge weaves scientific ideas through this pacey thriller – with a significant gift for making difficult scientific concepts understandable, relatable and exciting for young readers.
The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day is a story packed full of parallel and virtual worlds, but at the centre of it all is also a very real world, full of enough love and emotion to bring anyone back down to earth, and to leave children more illuminated than they were before they started.
Jenny Baldwin is a former English teacher and marketer for Scholastic UK. She is the founder of SHAPES for Schools (@shapes4schools), an education agency offering classroom resource-writing, content creation and marketing for schools outreach.
