From the time she was small, Amy Sarig King was obsessed with the sky. She’d lie on her back, trying to pick out shapes in the clouds. As she got older and stayed up later, that fascination grew to encompass the night sky. “I used to sit there and try and find shapes in the stars, the same as I would in the clouds,” she says.

The narrator of King’s new middle-grade novel, The Year We Fell From Space (Levine/Scholastic, Oct. 15), illustrated by Nina Goffi, is similarly star obsessed. Liberty Johansen is determined to change the way people see the night sky, but lately she’s been busy with seismicchanges to her own life: Her dad left her mom, her sister stopped going outside, and her former friend excommunicated her from the sixth grade.

King takes an unusual approach to divorce: As disruptive as it is, there’s no doubt the split is for the best. “You know, people shouldn’t stay married just because. That doesn’t make sense. If things are falling apart, they fall apart and you can rebuild,” she says. “It’s a great kind of model of hope, in a way, to watch the family move forward in different spaces.”

The novel takes on a lot of challenging topics, from bullying to parental depression, as her parents’ divorce reshapes the lives of Liberty and the members of her family. “I always find books are a good place to start conversations,” King explains. “That’s for me what books have always been about.”

King focuses on the way Liberty learns to process and express her emotions in a healthier way—talking to a therapist for example, instead of throwing a toaster. “The mental health of young people is my life’s work,” King says. “It’s very important to me on a personal level, on a public health level, on a societal level.” She points out that the incidence of depression and anxiety in children and teens is only increasing, and suicide remains a leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 24.

King is especially concerned with how adults often minimize or ignore young people’s negative feelings. “What’s one of the first things we do to children?” she says. “We shush them.” Moreover, many parents have fallen into the trap of believing that the most difficult thing for a kid is necessarily the best thing for them. By insisting children face their fears in the way we deem necessary, we end up denying them the opportunity to manage their own anxiety. “Why does everybody think you should be happy all the time?” King often asks the kids she meets. “I will tell you, that question blows young people’s minds every time I ask it.”

Because she’s so passionate about these topics, King especially loves the opportunities her work provides to visit schools and speak with young people directly. “I really don’t know which one comes first now,” she says. “I don’t know if I write books so I can still go and hang out with young people and talk with young people, or if it’s the other way around, and if I still write books to write books.” Both approaches seem to work beautifully for her.

Alex Heimbach is a writer and editor in California.