Also by this author: Discover Your Gifts: Celebrating How God Made You and Everyone You Know
Series: The Sensate Saga #1
Published by IVP Kids on February 10, 2026
Genres: Children's, Fiction, Christian, Speculative
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What if you could see things no one else could?
Meet Oscar, a new kid navigating life in a new town, at a new school, with no friends to lean on. Just as he's decided to shuffle his way through the year and settle for lonely lunches on the football bleachers, something extraordinary happens—Oscar begins to see glowing orbs that no one else can see. Confused and curious, he soon discovers he's not the only one with a mysterious power.
When chaos disrupts Centerville High, Oscar finds himself in the middle of an eclectic group of kids who all want answers . . . and are eager to take action! These zealous teen journalists and amateur detectives include other "Sensates"—kids who have unraveled their own mysteries. No longer alone, Oscar discovers that those orbs he's been seeing might just be put to good use.
My single sentence review of Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs is that it is an interesting story with baffling execution that brings up a lot of good ideas and then utterly fails to explore them in any meaningful way. For example, the central conflict in the book is that the diverse drum/bagpipe group at Oscar’s new school has been subject to racist vandalism and Oscar and his new friends go on a journey to discover the culprit. In the wake of the vandalism, teachers in the school adjust their lesson plans to impress upon readers the evils of racism and the history of civil rights in America. Except author Don Everts just tells us this in the broadest terms possible, keeping the actual history and hate at a distance. I think Everts wanted to tackle these difficult themes, but he does so in a way that’s so broad, generic, and sanitized that it robs those themes of any real power.
Everts does this throughout the book. He begins a storyline, but fails to commit to it in any substantive way. Oscar has a disability—he has one leg shorter than the other after it stopped growing due to a traumatic accident. That disability gets mentioned throughout the book, we see some characters pander to it, others mock him for it, and some internal monologuing about it. It’s probably the most developed theme of the book. But you could take it out completely and the overall story plot wouldn’t have to change.
It’s the same with the mysterious glowing orbs. They aren’t actually the mystery of the book, the racist vandalism is. Rather, the orbs are visions that only Oscar can see that help him perceive the internal lives of those around him. And he’s not the only one. There’s a whole group at the school called Sensates who have various supernatural perceptive abilities. Again, this is treated like a quirk rather than an integral part of the book. The orbs are crucial to the story, but only as a bubble-ex-machina and not explored in any deep way. You could remove them from the story and not change the substance of the plot.
And then there’s the actual plot. Oscar and his friends (who are also Sensates, but that’s not deeply explored, either) are trying to solve who did the racist vandalism. Using power of the orbs, they find out that it was actually a member of the targeted group who faked a racist attack to garner sympathy for the group to prevent cuts to their funding. This book has spent all of its 300 pages giving us the very good message that racism and discrimination is real, that it still exists, that it is a serious problem, that we should be united against it—and then the twist is that it was “fake racism” done by a person of color.
The strongest message of the book becomes minorities will weaponize past racism in order to advance their own standing. I don’t think that’s the message Everts was going for. It’s a message contradicted by the rest of the book. But it’s what happens. I was stunned that was the direction the book went. The only real discrimination that happens in the book is when a bully calls Oscar “Mr. Limpy” several times and Oscar puts him in his place by reminding him that, as a disabled person Oscar is a protected class and that sort of name-calling is legally be a hate crime and Oscar could have him arrested. Which is not how that works at all.
In the end, I see what Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs was trying to do—but it tried to cover too much without going into depth regarding any of it and ultimately undermined its own message at the end. I’m very excited to see IVP Kids expand from their children’s/picture books into middle grade fiction—I’m usually a fan of their work and love the ministry of InterVarsity—but I don’t get this one.