The Sideways Orbit of Evie Hart: Shortlisted for the 2024 CBCA Awards

By Samera Kamaleddine

Friendship, family and feelings collide in this sparkling middle-grade debut from Matilda Prize winner, Samera Kamaleddine.

Evie Hart likes rules. A lot. But as she embarks on her very last year of primary school, it feels like all the rules around her are being broken.

When Evie's class starts learning about the Earth's place in the universe, it makes Evie think about her own place in the world and where she belongs. Which has her more worried than ever.

When your mum writes a horoscope page for a living, it's hard not to think about what the future holds. Especially when she and the only dad Evie has ever known are acting like they're on different planets.

But the more Evie learns about the sky and the stars, the more she learns that changes in the world can't always be controlled. And maybe that's not a bad thing.

From the inaugural winner of the Matilda Prize comes a tender and moving story about one girl's journey to find her place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781460715246

Samera Kamaleddine

Samera Kamaleddine is a Sydney-based children's and youth librarian. For many years before that she was a journalist, writing for magazines about everything from friendship dramas and school bullies to body confidence. Her debut young adult novel Half My Luck was published after it won the Matilda Prize in 2020. The Sideways Orbit of Evie Hart (May 2023) is her first book for middle-grade readers.

Book preview

Chapter 1

My eyes blinked twelve times in a row one time. Small flickety flicks that were as fast as naughty cockroaches hurrying across a floor they’re not meant to be on.

This time it was only four.

No one would have noticed but Nicole Novokoff piped up, talking over Miss Owen like she always does. Her hand was in the air, reaching so high it could have come out of its socket. You’re supposed to wait until Miss Owen says, ‘Yes, [your name]?’ But Nicole couldn’t wait.

Miss Owen had started telling us that this year we were going to learn about space, but all anyone could hear over the top of her was: ‘Miss! Evie’s doing that weird thing with her face again!’

In that very second, twenty-six other faces turned to look straight at mine. I tried so hard in that very second, way behind my eye sockets, to make it stop.

Miss Owen frowned. ‘That was extremely rude on two counts, Nicole.’

I don’t reckon Nicole understood, because she replied with, ‘I think there’s something wrong with her.’

That’s when I pressed my eyes shut. It makes it all go away for real when you do that. When I opened them, the faces had turned their attention back to Miss Owen, who was re-telling her important news about space.

Uninterrupted, I hoped.

‘The Earth is part of a big, complex system of planets that orbit around a star — that is, the sun,’ Miss Owen said, drawing a sun with a smiley face on the board. ‘So, what we’re going to be doing throughout the year is looking at Earth and the solar system. And discussing our observations of the night sky.’

I know a lot about observations of the night sky, I thought, just as a little twitchy feeling was beginning underneath my eyelashes.

‘A fun question to kick us off,’ Miss Owen went on, using her hands to straighten out her floral skirt that was sitting exactly where it was supposed to: a smidgen over her knee cap. Because that’s the rules of wearing skirts for schoolteachers. ‘Who knows how long it takes for planet Earth to revolve around the sun?’

At the same time as she asked this question, a pair of non-twitching eyes was burning a black hole into my face. And I wished I was revolving on a whole other planet.

My best friend Farrah Farrah is in the other Year 6 class. After school I told her about our science lesson with Miss Owen this morning and she told me about hers. But I didn’t bother telling her about Nicole Novokoff. It would only have made her as feisty as when her dad accidentally puts onion on her wrap at his felafel shop.

That’s where we were headed right then: her dad’s felafel shop. Mr Farrah takes pride in being the only felafel shop in the whole area that makes a secret garlic sauce. But it’s no secret that his is the only felafel shop in the whole of our area.

‘I can’t believe they’re making us learn about space for a whole year!’ Farrah exclaimed as we walked. It’s the only place we’re allowed to walk after school, because the felafel shop is the third building after you turn left at the gates.

Technically it wouldn’t be twelve months, I wanted to say, but the rest of the year anyway.

‘That’s a lot of stargazing and stuff,’ Farrah said as we stepped through the door, because by now we were already there. ‘Lucky for you, your mum is —’

‘Hi, Mr Farrah!’ I almost shouted. Farrah talks really fast, so sometimes you have to be just as speedy to cut her off.

‘Hey hey, my dorta!’ That’s what it sounds like when Mr Farrah says ‘daughter’. ‘I have all the onion ready for you!’ And he winked at me, because we both know it will make her gag and I’ve known all about her gagging over onions since we were in the same Year 1 class.

‘Ew, Dad.’

He wasn’t offended. Instead, he was nudging us to a table covered in a clear plastic tablecloth and a plate piled high with felafel hot out of the oven and as crispy as my stepdad’s paley pale skin when he goes out in the sun for more than one minute.

As we started munching on the hot and crispy felafel, dipping them in and out of the creamy garlic sauce we were sharing in the middle of the table, Farrah put her thinking face on. This is when she pouts her mouth and squints her eyes and looks into the distance like she’s . . . like she’s stargazing.

‘Do you know, this will be the last science-y thing we ever do in primary school. Ever,’ she finally said, biting into her felafel, showing off the green fluffiness inside.

I hadn’t thought about it like that. The last ever science-y thing of my primary school life. Ever. For a best friend, Farrah really knew how to freak a girl out.

She winked, the way her dad does it. She’d been practising it, she told me the other day. We’d talked about that, but not much else lately. I hadn’t really felt like talking, and not just about Nicole Novokoff. But also about what happens next year when we won’t be in primary school any more. And why everything in the world already felt like it was changing.

Lee is all right for a stepdad. Except when he hogs the TV to watch his shows about ‘bent coppers’ all night long and says weird British things like, ‘What is she like?’ and, ‘As useless as a chocolate teapot.’

But he makes a pretty good curry.

I watched him plate it up — one for him, one for me, one for Sadie — as I wondered how to tell him I’d eaten too many felafels that afternoon and didn’t have room for his curry, as good as it would be.

Sadie had tucked right in. When you’re six years old you tend to do that: whatever anyone tells you and without asking why. She hadn’t even asked why Mum never ate dinner with us any more. I’d asked why eleven days earlier. Mum said it was because that’s the time of day when she’s most in tune with the universe and she does her best work and her study gets a nice dusk glow and I don’t think she was telling the truth.

While I was thinking, for the twelfth day in a row, how to ask Mum again without getting in trouble for sticking my nose into adult business, Lee and Sadie had been talking about an animal project Sadie started with her class.

‘I sort of have a new project too,’ I blurted out, surprising even myself.

‘Well, tell us about it, love,’ Lee said, because it’s a very British thing to do to call people ‘love’.

I suddenly regretted blurting that out. I looked over my right shoulder to make sure Mum hadn’t come out of her study for a cup of tea or something. ‘Um. It’s about the planets and stuff.’

Lee raised his eyebrows up high into his hairless head as he scooped up some curry and rice with his fork and said, just before shovelling it into his mouth: ‘Your mum’d be well pleased to hear that.’

‘What would I be pleased to hear?’ Now Mum was standing behind my left shoulder, the one I forgot to check, with her empty teacup in one hand and a very interested look on her face, which Nance O’Neil from down the road says looks a lot like mine.

Lee pointed his fork in my direction, where I was sitting still without even touching one grain of rice. ‘She’s got a school project you could probably help her out with.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, when I really wanted to tell a fat lie instead.

Lee was looking down into his bowl, instead of straight up at Mum. ‘Right up your alley, it is,’ he added.

Remember how I said he was all right for a stepdad? Yeah, well, I take it back.

I agreed to follow Mum into her study for two reasons. One: it would help me find clues about why she hadn’t been eating dinner with me, Sadie and Lee. Two: I knew I would be able to catch up on all this week’s gossip about Kate Middleton, the nicest princess in the world, because Mum always had a copy of the latest New Woman Weekly magazine on her desk. It would really save me some sneaking around after she’d gone to bed to try and read it.

But Mum definitely thought I was following her in to talk about my new space stuff.

‘Okay, so right now, we’re heading into the first quarter phase of the moon,’ she started saying. ‘So, it’s a time that’s perfect for decision making.’

She paused to think about that for a moment, which gave me a good chance to look around from where I was standing next to her. Her computer was in screen saver mode with a photo of me and Sadie at the beach — as per usual. Her work notebooks for all her different columns were stacked in the righthand corner — as per usual. A copy of New Woman Weekly with Kate Middleton on the cover looking pretty and smart and kind — as per usual.

‘You know,’ Mum said, snapping me back to the conversation, ‘when I first started out as a journalist, I got to interview this cool astrophysicist. I think I still have the clipping somewhere.’ And she started opening and closing the drawers on the other side of her desk, lifting a piece of paper or a book here and there inside them, flicking her long chocolatey hair away so she could see better. Maybe Kate Middleton gets her long chocolatey hair by trimming it with the moon phases too.

How the Princess of Wales vows to stop the rumours, the cover of that magazine said.

‘She’d done some interesting research . . .’

Evangeline Hart vows to stop the rumours, it could say about me.

‘. . . and was one of the first women to be doing it . . .’

But I’m not nearly as powerful as Kate Middleton and I probably won’t stop the rumours, is what I was thinking right then while Mum was unlocking her computer screen and starting a Google search.

The speedy tip-tapping of her fingers on the keyboard made me lose my concentration and I had to open my eyes wide to stop them from blinking to the pace of it. While I was making my eyes stay wide open, I spotted another copy of New Woman Weekly on Mum’s desk, open to a page with big purple letters that said Horoscopes by Mystic Mama. And a photo of my mum’s face printed right next to it. Which some say looks like mine.

What would Kate Middleton do? That’s what I was pondering in class the next day while Miss Owen and Nicole Novokoff were having an argument about whether or not the moon gets sad during the day.

It’s because I’d overheard something at recess earlier. I’d overheard it before, but this time was especially hard to overhear.

‘My mum said it’s all lies,’ is what Nicole had been saying to her best friend Demi-Louise Palmerston, while she flicked her inky black hair behind her shoulders. ‘She just makes it up.’

Demi-Louise had nodded.

‘She can’t see the future at all. She doesn’t know what’s happening next week or next year. She lies to people,’ Nicole had continued between bites of a peanut butter sandwich that was cut into triangles. ‘And all these poor people go ’round believing her. That’s what my mum says anyway.’

Demi-Louise had nodded again.

Nicole went on. And on.

Then she said (and this is the bit that was especially hard to overhear): ‘It’s not even a real job.’

It’s tricky to know if Nicole realised I was listening from my spot next to Farrah three rows away. But I was listening, despite Farrah talking a gazillion miles an hour about a YouTube video one of her brothers had shown her the night before.

My mum reckons Farrah could talk underwater with marbles in her mouth.

But my mum doesn’t always say things that are true.

As I sat in class waiting for Miss Owen and Nicole’s debate to end so we could find out our first task about space, I wondered if Kate Middleton liked to read her horoscopes. She’s a Capricorn, which means she’s sensitive, practical and disciplined. And that’s lucky, as Buckingham Palace has a lot of rules, such as ‘no wearing open-toed shoes’.

I wondered if she ever picks up New Woman Weekly when she sees herself on the cover and flicks to Horoscopes by Mystic Mama somewhere near the back and believes that an excellent new work opportunity will come her way next week like it tells her.

I wondered if she would stand up and say something if she overheard a certain person slagging off (that’s what Lee would call it) her own mum like that.

Or if she wouldn’t say a single thing because, after all, it’s not even a real job.

Finally, Miss Owen and Nicole had stopped debating. I don’t even remember who won and who lost but Nicole was pouting. Then again, Nicole was always pouting.

‘What is Earth’s place in the universe?’ Miss Owen said. Sammy Burratini put his hand in the air because he always has the answer before anyone else does. But I don’t think Miss Owen was actually looking for an answer this time.

‘That’s part one of our research,’ she went on. And she wrote Part one: What is Earth’s place in the universe? on the board in cursive writing.

Sammy still had his hand in the air, waiting for Miss Owen’s permission to speak. He at least had more manners than some people in our class (I mean Nicole).

Miss Owen was still facing the board. She wrote some dot points underneath her big heading: Distance of planets from the sun, Size of the planets, How we observe the sun, moon and planets.

After what felt like three hundred and sixty-five days of Earth rotating the sun, Sammy