Every Soul a Star

Nearly 13, Ally Summers has a passion for astronomy. She has always been homeschooled. Her parents, both scientists, agreed 10 years earlier to leave their native Chicago to start a remote campsite called Moon Shadow Campgrounds in New England. The camp provides them the opportunity to collect astronomical data impossible to gather amidst the light pollution in the city. For the past three years, the family—including Ally and her younger brother, Kenny—have prepared the camp for the flood of tourists expected at Moon Shadow to observe a total solar eclipse, the first visible in mainland America in 75 years.

Ally manages the camp’s six signature recreational sites, which she calls The Unusuals. There is the Labyrinth, a series of massive concentric circles made from stones. The Labyrinth challenges visitors to follow the circles to the center and there ask a big, difficult question about their life and, in turn, receive an answer. There is a site along a shallow river where campers pan for gold (her brother periodically stocks the river with tiny gold nuggets); there is the Art House, a cabin where kids paint on the walls; Alien Central, where campers listen in on astronomical equipment sweeping the skies for any radio signal that might indicate extraterrestrial life; the Sun Garden, with a giant sundial; and the Star Garden, where guests scan the night skies using a battery of telescopes.

Ally and Kenny have grown up without the distractions of television, pop music, video games, and social media. Kenny has become an expert in bugs; Ally dreams of discovering a comet (she wears a fragment of a meteorite in a necklace her grandfather gave her). Ally has no friends, however—she holds nightly conversations with three friends she imagines living on the distant stars she watches through her telescope.

Bree Holden, for her part, has grown up in the city. She is savvy to the ways of middle school. She is beautiful by everyone’s account. She knows fashion and makeup—she dreams of becoming a supermodel. Although her parents are both accomplished physicists, to Bree, “dark matter and anti-matter really means don’t matter” (4). It is the last day of seventh grade, and Bree looks forward to a summer working her part-time job at the mall. The first day of summer break, Bree and her best friend, Claire, attend an information forum on modeling held at the community center. Even though the presenter cautions against unrealistic hopes for success in a highly competitive field, Bree is confident she will succeed. After the program, however, Bree’s mother informs her that a major research grant has come through and that in just days the family will be moving to someplace called Moon Shadow Campgrounds for the next three years. There, in addition to running the campground operations, the parents can gather data for their research into dark matter. Bree is stunned. She cannot imagine life away from her friends. She pouts at dinner, refuses to help the family with a big garage sale, and says little during the flight or in the car to the campsite.

We meet Jack Rosten. Jack remembers little about his father—he abandoned the family when Jack was only four, and his mother has since remarried multiple times. Jack is shy and painfully aware of his awkward size: He is pudgy and tall for his age, and it does not help that his older brother is a major jock. Jack daydreams and finds applying himself in class difficult, preferring to sketch fantastic creatures in his notebook. He lives comfortably in a world of his own invention. He is given to lucid dreaming, periods when he is both awake and asleep, dreaming and aware he is dreaming.

At the end of seventh grade, Jack finds out he must repeat science in summer school. While in the refuge of his treehouse, sketching aliens and snacking, Jack is summoned to the phone. His science teacher, Mr. Silver, makes Jack an offer: Avoid summer school by agreeing to be his assistant for a two-week stint at Moon Shadow, where Mr. Silver is leading a busload of 30 eclipse chasers. Jack will observe the approaching solar eclipse and gather data as part of an international scientific cooperative designed to prove the existence of an exoplanet—a new planet not in the Solar System. Jack agrees to go. The two are to leave the next day. Jack quickly gathers his things, including a tattered stuffed bunny that his father left in his crib the night he left for good.

Two days later, Jack begins the 14-hour bus ride to Moon Shadow, surrounded by eager eclipse chasers. He bones up on eclipses. Science has never interested him, and he wonders why Mr. Silver chose him to be his assistant. On the bus, he sits next to an elderly woman, Stella, who enthusiastically tells Jack about the wonders of witnessing an eclipse; this is her sixth one. At one point, Jack is certain he hears the bus engine making an odd noise. He tells Mr. Silver, and the bus driver pulls over and finds a problem with the engine crankshaft. Had Jack not spoken up, the bus could have broken down in the middle of nowhere.

Meanwhile, Ally welcomes her friend Ryan to the camp—he stays at the campsite along with his grandparents every summer. Ryan, a year older, is the only real friend Ally has. This summer, however, Ally notices Ryan has changed. He brings a weight set—he plans on trying out for varsity football—and asks if any “hotties” are coming for the eclipse. Ryan, Ally suddenly understands, does not consider her a hottie.

The morning after Ryan arrives, Ally takes him to Alien Central and explains to him her plans to discover a comet by tracking readings of any disturbances in the sky. It is tedious work. The outdated computers work day and night sorting through the non-stop inundation of data. Suddenly, Ryan notices a spike in the computer printout, indicating an anomaly Ally has never seen before. Excited, Ally immediately sends that portion of the reading to an international organization that tracks celestial data for confirmation, which could take weeks.

Ally returns to the main cabin. There she meets the Holdens, who are just arriving. She assumes they are more eclipse tourists. Awkwardly, Ally’s mother breaks the news to Ally that the family is moving back to Chicago after the eclipse and that the Holdens are there to take over the camp operations. Ally is stunned: “I know I should cry, should be screaming to the rafters at the unfairness of it all, but I’m just numb” (111).