Running in Circles by Shivaun Plozza

Title: Running in Circles

Author: Shivaun Plozza

Genre: Science/Contemporary

Publisher: UQP

Published: 28^th April 2026

Format: Paperback

Pages: 256

Price: $17.99

Synopsis: From award-winning author Shivaun Plozza comes this moving coming-of-age story about family, picking your battles and the transformative power of science. When crop circles appear in Tully, North Queensland, twelve-year-old Dell knows it’s a hoax. She’s a future climate scientist who believes in facts, not science fiction. But Dell’s estranged mum is an extraterrestrial fanatic. She blusters back into town armed with alien conspiracy theories and a dazzling smile.

If Dell can prove the crop circles are fake, surely her mum will hightail it out of Tully again, preferably before she causes Dell’s dad and three sisters further heartbreak. But as her mother’s claims grow more out of this world and alien fever takes over the country, Dell worries she’s fighting a losing battle. How can she convince anyone of the truth when they’re all so desperate to believe a lie?

~*~

For five years, Dell, her sisters, and her father have been living in relative peace after their mum, Andie ran off. Summer and Dell felt it the hardest, whilst Prim and Una were too young to remember the hurt, or their mother. Dell is twelve, and interested in weather science, and dong well at school. She finds her younger sisters annoying, but would do anything for them. And her need to protect her family intensifies when crop circles start appearing in Tully, in North Queensland. It has to be a hoax – there’s so much evidence that they aren’t real, are things of science fiction, and that they don’t prove aliens exist. So it should be fine.

Except they’ve brought her mum, a ufologist, and a supposed professor to town. Everyone in town is falling for Dell’s mum’s stories and conspiracy theories, believing the media fuss that aliens are coming to Tully to help humanity and fix the climate issues the planet is facing. To top it off, she keeps trying to stop her mum from seeing the family to protect them. Poor Dell is hurting from her mother leaving five years ago and doesn’t want her family to go through it again, which she feels they inevitably will when the aliens don’t come and her mother is proven wrong.

The question is, will her family believe her? Or will they go along with the woman who abandoned them to keep the peace, and as Dad says, pick your battles? Dell has to confide in her friend, Teddy, grandmother Mo-Mo and another kid at school, Vinh, someone she never thought would be on her side. Dell can see through her mother’s claims and fake smiles where nobody else can, it seems. Where Prim and Una are charmed by her and her fantasy world, whilst Summer is becoming increasingly withdrawn, pulling away from the family she can trust. Even everyone else in town is being sucked in.

Running in Circles takes climate change, familial issues, community and science, brings them together and creates a compelling story of how easy it is to be taken in by shiny ideas and conspiracy theories, even when there is enough proof to show that what the out there ideas are proposing are false. Dell’s mum has an explanation for everything, dismissing things that don’t fit her worldview and beliefs in an eerie reflection of how some people easily fall into the trap of believing what people in power say in the real world.

It also shows the conflict between the need for people to do the work to change the world, and the desire for people to want an easy way out, a solution that they don’t have to think about. Believing that beings from another world or planet have the solution is easier than realising we have to do something ourselves in this book. It’s delicate and sensitive, navigating that tough transition time of being twelve, and having so many things change, or being confronted with the unexpected in life and within the community you live in.

We all go through changes and challenges at every stage of life, and life can throw us curveballs, as it does for Dell in this book. It is how we cope with them, who helps us see them through, and how we come together in times of need and uncertainty to be there for each other. This was a very compelling and touching book that I’m sure will find its readers.