Published: 2009

Author: Wendy Mass

Summary/General Thoughts: Four teens, with wildly different personalities, meet at a campground, along with hundreds of adults, who are all coming to see a full solar eclipse. Despite their differences, the teens gradually form a friendship group.

This book is very character-driven. It is not nearly as boring as a plot summary makes it sound. I read it in one sitting.

Prose Style: I think it is beautifully written. Each point of view character has a distinct voice. Each paragraph has a nice, almost musical flow. The vocabulary is sophisticated.

Educational Content: There is enough information here about astronomy in general, and solar eclipses in particular, that this book could be used to introduce an astronomy unit. The description of the actual eclipse in the story, makes it seem glamorous and exciting.

Authorial Worldview: Secular. There are three times in this book where a character prays:

someone set up a “shrine” to two ancient Chinese astronomers, a small group of white folks dance an Indian rain dance, and one Egyptian tourist prays to Allah that the sun will return after the eclipse. In the broader scheme of the story, these are trivial details, irrelevant to the plot and irrelevant to the character development. However, it illustrates where the writer is coming from.

The bulk of the narrative conveys a very vanilla, be-kind-and-eat-your-greens style of morality. It is neither traditional values nor Woke values.

Content: Physical affection is limited to hand-holding, and a boy’s arm around a girl. One boy asks another boy about “hotties.” One girl says to another girl, “I thought you guys were getting all hot and heavy.” There is no swearing.

One teen has been raised by his grandparents. Right before the story starts, his grandmother has divorced his grandfather, because, as she is overheard telling a friend, she has taken care of other people for fifty years, and doesn’t want to do so any longer.

Portrayal of Home Education: There are three main characters. Of the three, one has always been homeschooled, but she is about to start school. A second main character is a schoolgirl who is about to start homeschooling. Both homeschool families are using a regimented School-In-A-Box approach, and both families are homeschooling as a consequence of living off-grid, far from the nearest town.

Homeschoolers are portrayed as unusually smart, but socially isolated and naïve.

Respect for Adults: The parents are firmly in charge. But they are distant. The whole story happens under the parents’ noses. But they don’t seem to notice anything their kids are doing or thinking or feeling.

The only adult who seems at all tuned in to a teen’s inner world, is the science teacher who dragged a failing student (the other, non-homeschooled main character) along to see a solar eclipse.