Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass

Mass, W. (2008). Every Soul A Star (p. 336). Little, Brown Young Readers.

ISBN: 0316002569

Price : $15.99 hardcover

Reader's Annotation: Three fifteen year old strangers share two weeks and one life-altering experience at Moon Shadow Campground.

Summary: Ally has lived most of her life at the Moon Shadow Campground, which her parents bought when she was young because it would be in the path of a solar eclipse a decade or so after they bought it. Bree's parents are taking over the campground after the eclipse. This means Bree, who is beautiful and wants to be a model, will be living in the middle of nowhere and going to homeschool, while Ally, who doesn't remember to brush her hair most days will be moving to a public school in Chicago. Also, there's Jack, who is helping out on an eclipse tour to get out of going to summer school. He's a pudgy recluse who ends up in the middle of Ally and Bree's drama.

Genre: book, coming of age, family, fiction, friends, identity, love story, siblings

Series : This book is not part of a series.

Evaluation: I loved this book. I found the characters to be well realized, even beautiful Bree, and though the circumstances were unusual, I was willing to go along with the plot. I've already recommended this book to several tweens.

Why it belongs in a Tween Collection: I think multiple POV books are good choices for tweens, because it's good to understand a situation or story from different viewpoints, and what better way to do that than to have several people telling the same story. The characters in this book feel familiar, and readers will find themselves in Ally, Bree and Jack.


Readalikes :

• My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath
  
• The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
  

Other Useful Info:

• Wendy Mass' Website

Reviews:

excerpt of School Library Journal Review, found in full here

I always enjoy a kid's book that works against my natural expectations of what's going to happen next. I mean, look at this equation: Popular girl meets unpopular girl at campground. There are only a couple of different ways you can go with a storyline like that, so Mass gets points for taking the road less traveled. For one thing, the kids in this book get along. I sort of expected this to be a novel where people fought, bickered, and came to learn about themselves through conflict. But this is a little different. The kids have essentially been tossed out onto their own by the adults in their lives, or have left those adults voluntarily for the first time. Adrift they end up clinging to people in similar situations. And Mass toys with her canny readers, TOYS I say! You simply cannot have a boy reading the Ray Bradbury story All Summer in a Day (it's never named but you know that's what it is) in the first act without implying that something similar is going to happen to him in the third. I won't give anything away, but it's nerve wracking to say the last.

Ally is one of the few homeschooled heroines I've found in middle grade fiction lately. That's neat. It's nice to have a detail like that interwoven with a tale about the death of the sun and that equally awesome event, our entrance into teenagerhood. And I really do think that you could sell this book equally well to the kid who loves books about science and realism as to the kid who'll only touch titles that contain fashion forward females. I could be wrong, but I think it's worth trying. Give it a look yourself. It's a pretty neat juggling act.