YA author Jen Ferguson is known for writing books that resonate emotionally with her young readers — and her latest title, A Constellation of Minor Bears, is gearing up to do the same.

A Constellation of Minor Bears tells the story of Molly, her brother, Hank, and his best friend Tray. When Hank suffers a traumatic brain injury while indoor climbing, Molly is devastated to embark on their planned graduation trip without him. Tray, on the other hand, doesn't seem to mind, which infuriates Molly, who's harbouring layers of resentment towards him surrounding her brother's accident.

But as the two trek through the wilderness together, they'll have to hash it all out and band together for the journey's twists and turns.

Ferguson is a YA author, activist and academic of Michif/Métis and Canadian settler heritage, based in Los Angeles. Ferguson has a PhD in English and creative writing. Her debut novel, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, won the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — text.

Her second novel, Those Pink Mountain Nights, explores topics such as missing and murdered Indigenous women, mental health and sexuality.

LISTEN | Jen Ferguson on The Next Chapter:

Media Audio | The Next Chapter : Self-discovery and pizza in Those Pink Mountain Nights

Open Full Embed in New Tab Loading external pages may require significantly more data usage.

"Molly, a fat teen, is not going to let anything, not her brother's brain injury, or her subsequent fall out with her brother's best friend stop her from hiking the Pacific Crest Trail the summer after graduation," said Ferguson in an email.

"When you are a fat child who grows into a fat teenager who becomes a fat adult, you learn the world aggressively tries and tries and keeps trying to limit you, to tell you that your body is something unwieldy, something too much," said Ferguson.

"This is my book about bodies, about thinking about bodies in expansive ways."

A Constellation of Minor Bears comes out on Sept. 24, 2024. You can read an excerpt below.

I drag my pack down the stairs, wondering if it really is too heavy, if I'm carrying too much baggage to pull off this freaking trip. Before I decide to empty the thing out and reweigh each item one by one, searching for what to leave behind, my brother, Hank, comes barreling into the kitchen. Loudly, the way he used to.

"Morning, Mols," he says, and grabs his favourite mug. It's all text, no images: Well, the Dentist Is Afraid of You Too!

Ignoring how my heartbeat pounds too fast, how the past week's arguments still thrum around inside my body, I put this first. "How are you? Today?"

Hank shrugs, which, lately, is his normal answer. Sips his coffee, changes the subject. "You look festive."

I'm already wearing my grad outfit, knee-length bright pink tulle paired with a plain white tank. I'd forgotten how the tulle itches, how in summer's heat skin against skin chafes. But I don't have the time to switch it out and nothing else in my heavily merino-wool wardrobe fits the occasion.

Hank's wearing sweatpants. But since my brother's not graduating, he doesn't have to be at the school as early as I do. "Thanks. You look half-asleep."

Hank laughs.

There's a fiddle, a few strings broken, on our kitchen table. While my dad was raised by a white family, and later married our white mom, these days, Dad works to keep the Métis Nation accountable, as they more often than not barrel over First Nations' rights while fighting the government to establish their own. And because my dad spent some time in prison when he was younger, years before he met our mom, my dad acts as a mentor for Indigenous peoples newly released from provincial and federal institutions when he isn't working on recording and arranging the old songs.

But let's be honest, the old songs, the fiddle, that's where his heart lives. But this instrument and the seven or eight others just like it that he has, they mostly live in this kitchen. Or they do now.

"You ready?" Hank asks as he spreads homemade saskatoon berry jam on health-food bread without toasting it.

I look at my very bright hiking pack. "I'm pretty certain I'm leaving something important behind."

I'm not trying to start that up again. The fight. But I can't say it either.

Hank only nods, eats his breakfast.

My dad wasn't around for a lot of my childhood. Hank's dad, who's white, hasn't ever been around. And while Hank grew up with his grandparents for the first eight years of his life, he moved in with us after they passed. Years later, our mom and my dad got remarried.

I know, right? That hardly ever happens.

Across the kitchen along the long wall are my mom's pretty, mostly floral-themed political cross-stitch. Keep Your Hands Off My Uterus. Abortion Is Healthcare.

Yes, my parents raised me up so that I don't believe in colonial borders or faux apologies made by the church for genocide or other violences. But I've always been a little angry, a little mad that the world around us seemed too large, too unwieldy. Until science camp, the summer before Grade 6, and suddenly everything made sense. With science there are answers.

Hank's still eating, still ignoring me.

Our mom comes into the kitchen to start on her boiled-egg breakfast, and a minute later, so does my dad. Even if Hank was going to tell me something important, he can't now. He spends the rest of breakfast typing on his phone, even though, after his accident, the doctors highly recommended he avoid too much screen time. It's not that our parents mean to do it, or maybe they do, but Mom and Dad seem to shut things down. When they're around, I never ask Hank how he's doing. Because they'll only redirect the conversation to something else, Mom's latest win in reshaping policy or my dad's epiphany over the arrangement he's been working on.

It's so frequent, it's like it's planned.

But they wouldn't do that to me, right?

Graduation looks nothing like how I imagined walking onto a stage to receive my high school diploma would. Unlike in middle school, there's no stage, no valedictorian, and the only person to make an unsettlingly awkward speech is the principal. We're all stuffed into the gym, standing on the too-shiny floors, in our outdoor shoes, which on any other day is a crime, our families in the bleachers as we suffer the heat.

The doors leading to the north field are propped open.

It doesn't help any.

Traylor Lambert, my brother's best friend and the person I currently dislike most in the universe, holds my left arm. But since he's also my best friend, this is complicated, like explaining the atom, something that nobody can see but that affects everything. Tray's brown hair is braided, tied with a strip of leather. He's wearing the nice pants I helped him pick out for a funeral two years ago, a brand-spanking-new white button-down, and his Métis sash. It's similar, but not identical to the one my dad and uncle wear.

I don't know exactly how they're different. Only that they are. This is a question I've never asked, and that's on me.

From the front end of the procession, Shawn E. throws his voice: "Yeah, graduaaa-shawn!"

He's probably been waiting to do that for four long years.

Most snicker. But not me, or Tray.

The principal shushes the room. In the stands, my brother and cousin Lou hold up their pink glitter-glue GO MOLLY sign, and to follow the no-exuberant-outbursts rule outlined in the principal's welcome speech, they mime cheering. It's too, too much. When they fall into laughter, my cousin's beaded earrings catch the light and shimmer in the manner of stars.

This time, the principal taps the mic, clearing his throat dramatically. He's slightly above shushing spectators.

"I mean," Tray whispers, "if your name is Shawn, how could you not?"

I shrug, performing another turn in this overblown marching number. In the process, I lose sight of my family.

They've dressed up.

It bothers me that we graduates aren't wearing traditional gowns over our dresses and suits. The boys are in churchgoing clothes, the girls wrapped in shiny material, mostly Nordic colours, like they're presents in a holiday IKEA display.

I would have preferred the grad gown. In that billowy thing, we wouldn't be in competition, showing off our parents' wallets and our bodies. Nobody has a thigh gap in a grad gown. Some of us haven't ever had one, are thick thigh girls.

When the final lap begins and I pivot in the wrong direction, Tray corrects me. "No, left."

I've been so torn up over my brother's last-minute decision to drop out of our grad trip, because he hasn't actually graduated, he says, as if that's a good enough reason not to go through with something we've been planning forever. So I skipped last week's not-so voluntary choreography practice.

What are they going to do? Ungraduate me?

This is the major difference between myself and Traylor Lambert: I'm torn up Hank isn't coming on our trip, and Hank's best friend doesn't seem bothered.

Excerpt from A Constellation of Minor Bears Copyright © by Jen Ferguson. Used by permission of HarperCollins Children's Books.