Okay, so Pluto's not a planet anymore. It's called a "dwarf planet" but dwarf planets aren't planets, which is an interesting language question for another day.
This book is part love and family story, part adventure-of-discovery story. It features cool telescopes and mysterious wandering objects in the night sky. These big objects turn out to mean that Pluto is just one of a bunch of large objects in the Kuiper belt. Brown gives a sane explanation of why the word "planet" is hard to define, and why it makes sense to think of a planet as one of a small number of large important things in the solar system. Also, the structure is clever. I can't quite get over how lucky the author was to be discovering cosmic things and falling in love, getting married, and having a baby all in the same years. The parallels make this science memoir something of a tearjerker.
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