Three 13-year-olds have very different personalities:
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Ally enjoys being homeschooled. She doesn’t know the latest slang and doesn’t care about how she looks; she just loves being able to study the stars from the campground that her family runs.
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Jack is a bit overweight, just like his birth father (who he’s never seen since he took off while Jack’s mom was pregnant). Jack’s learned some things from SD1 and SD2 (step-dads 1 and 2), but he feels a bit lost in life. He doesn’t apply himself in school, and his only interest seems to be in art (although he’s self-conscious about showing his artwork to anyone).
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Bree is an apple that fell far from the tree. Her parents and sister love science, but all she wants to be when she grows up is a fashion model. She thinks that looks are everything, and if that’s all that she had to worry about for a career, then her life would be both simple and plentiful with opportunities for travel.
“To me, dark matter and anti-matter really means ‘doesn’t matter’” (4).
“I am not plain or average or -- god forbid -- vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge, and a cherry on top” (4).
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After their 7th grade year, these three kids have a summer they didn’t expect:
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Ally’s family plans to hand over the campground to Bree’s family after the eclipse. Ally’s dad accepted a job in Chicago, where Ally and her brother (Kenny) can hopefully learn more about the world.
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Jack has been sentenced to summer school (due to spending all his time in science class drawing instead of paying attention). However, he’s offered a more exciting alternative: assisting his teacher with research on a 2-week trip to the Moon Shadow campground.
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Bree expects her time at Moon Shadow (which her family will run for the next 3 years) to be like purgatory until they move and she can pursue a modeling career. Later, she corrects herself that the campground is more like “the other place” (with pitchforks, etc.).
“Purgatory is the place where souls go to wait before being sent to their final destination. That’s like me. My life is being put on hold for three whole years” (67).
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Similar to The Parent Trap, Ally and Bree conspire to try to convince their parents to back out of the deal:
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They bring up to Ally’s parents that in the city, there’s more crime, more light pollution (making it harder to see the lights), and less bugs for Kenny to study.
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They bring up to Bree’s parents that at the campground, homeschooling is expensive (due to the materials they need to buy, which are free at public schools), there are frequent power outages, weeks might pass until the streets are even passible in the winter, there are a ton of bugs, and there are a ton of dangers (e.g., a river, bears, tree stumps, beehives) to people who sleepwalk like Bree’s sister.
The parents are initially shaken up, but they later decide that it’s better to be forewarned and forearmed, so they thank the girls for bringing these concerns to their attention.
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The three kids become friends, discover an exo-planet, enjoy the eclipse, and accept their life situations:
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Ally’s excited that in the city, she’ll have access to things like planetariums and astronomy clubs.
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Jack finds Ally fascinating and gifts her with a drawing of her riding a comet with an “Alpha Girl” superhero costume on (considering how “Ally” is short for “Alpha”, the brightest star in any constellation).
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While reading this book, you learn some educational things:
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Black widows and brown recluse are poisonous spiders to watch out for.
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You can listen to the sound of the sun, but it just sounds like white noise.
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There’s space junk racing around in space. This consists of pieces of the space station, astronaut gloves, etc.
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“The only reason we can see an eclipse is because the moon and the sun happen to look the exact same size from earth. But really, the moon is 400 times smaller. It’s just that coincidentally, the sun is 400 times as far away as the moon, so they look the same size to us. If the moon were even a few miles smaller across, it wouldn’t hide the face of the sun when it passed in front” (82).
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“Polaris” is another name for the North Star.
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“If the North Star was directly overhead, you’d be at the North Pole. If it was really near the ground, or the horizon, you’d be standing near the equator” (194).
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A campground is a lot of work to maintain. For example, you need to make sure that you don’t run out of toilet paper or food.
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It’s helpful if a campground has some “Unusuals” (such as a labyrinth) to attract people. A labyrinth is NOT the same thing as a maze. Like the stone arrangement at the Youngstown Motherhouse, it’s just an arrangement of stones for you to walk on as you ponder.
“Life is short, but it’s wide” (185).