Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass

Middle School

At Moon Shadow, an isolated campground, thousands have gathered to catch a glimpse of a rare and extraordinary total eclipse of the sun. It’s also where three lives are about to be changed forever:

Alpha a.k.a. Ally likes the simple things in life—labyrinths, star-gazing, and comet-hunting. Her home, the Moon Shadow campground, is a part of who she is, and she refuses to imagine it any other way.

Popular and gorgeous (everybody says so), Bree is a future homecoming queen for sure. Bree wears her beauty like a suit of armor. But what is she really hiding?

Overweight and awkward, Jack is used to spending a lot of time alone. But when opportunity knocks, he finds himself in situations he never would have imagined and making friends in the most unexpected situations.

An amazing coming-of-age story that everyone interested in space should read.

Bree is what you would call stuck up and small minded. She spends way too much time thinking about her looks and other people’s looks; she even rates people on a scale of 1 to 10. Don’t take to heart anything Bree says in the first few chapters. I don’t/can’t read books with this sort of character anymore. I just lost my patience to put up with them anymore. I’m just glad this book has two other main characters that I like more than Bree.

Jack is a lot more interesting than Bree. Jack hasn’t really done much in his 13 years of life but when he gets the chance to get out of summer school by attending solar eclipse tour with his science teacher, he jumps at it. Jack’s character grows a lot during his trip. He ends up being a hero multiple times but each time he doesn’t believe he is.

Ally is my favorite main character. She’s completely dedicated to her home and outer space. She loves her home and she has every right to. The Moon Shadow Campgrounds is pretty amazing. I’d go there. As the story goes, Ally learns that the people around her are changing but she’s pretty much stayed the same.

I kept dreading the moment when Ally and Bree would meet. Those two are as different as night and day and I just knew the two of them would clash. Some of the stuff Bree says to Ally made me cringe. There’s also a twist in this story that you’ll have to read this book to find out but when I figured it out, I was like “Oh boy. This is gonna get messy.”

Wendy Mass does a great job at explain how a solar eclipse works. A solar eclipse is the obscuring of the light of the sun by the intervention of the moon between it and a point on the Earth. Here’s a diagram of the how it works:

Not the best diagram but you get the picture.

Anyone remember the solar eclipse that happened in the United States back in August 21, 2017? Well I do. Because I got to see it! I didn’t get to see the total eclipse but I was lucky enough to be walking my dog when some neighbors let me look through their eclipse glasses. It was incredible!

This story talks a lot about star-gazing, constellations, comets, asteroids, meteors, beings on other planets, and many other space related things. For any of you science geeks out there who want a book to read, here’s the book for you.