56 pages • 1 hour read
Wendy MassEvery Soul a Star
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaEpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
cSummary
In the Epilogue each of the three narrators shares the impact of their profound experience at Moon Shadow. Even as the moon’s shadow moves across the field and the eclipse comes to its inevitable end, Ally understands how important friends can be. She is giddy, feeling “lighter” and “freer.” Now she sees the family’s move as an opportunity to find out important things about herself that she could never discover in her life far from other people. It’s been rewarding learning about the stars and planets, but, as she admits, “I’ve got the whole world to see” (311).
Bree prints off a letter to Claire declining the invitation to spend the summer but offering her friend the chance to come to the camp. She says, “I’m still really scared, but not as much and there are things I sort of like” (313). Her little sister gives her three copies of a photo she took during the eclipse. It shows the entire Team Exo. When Bree delivers a copy to Jack, she makes one last request before he departs the camp on the bus: “I want you to teach me how to fly” (316). He explains ludic dreaming to her, and for the first time Bree appreciates the importance of the inner life.
When it comes time for Jack to board the bus home, Team Exo sends him off. The gang promises to return to camp the next summer for a kind of reunion. Jack is determined to engage in the real world he has long ignored—“to make my outer life as big as my inner life” (319). In a final gesture, when Jack is alone with Ally, he gives her a picture of her he drew—it is Ally as a superhero astride a comet. Ally is both flattered and delighted. As she helps Jack pack his remaining things, she sees his tattered stuffed bunny. In a moment of unexpected honesty, Jack tells Ally about the stuffed animal and his father and why he still carries it with him. understands: “He’s a really special bunny,” she says (322). The two friends hug goodbye.
Epilogue Analysis
The closing section serves as the novel’s denouement—that is, the section that shows how the characters have handled change, and how they have begun to resolve the conflicts that initially defined their character. The three principals each narrate one last section in which they recount the departure from camp.
They are clearly different. The experience at Moon Shadow led each to a new perspective: Ally looks forward to the challenges of life in the city, Bree appreciates an entirely new sense of beauty in nature and realizes the importance of her inner life rather than her appearance, and Jack is ready to leave his treehouse-world and risk the experience of trust and friendship. The narrative does not follow each narrator into their new life, but the closing entries give the reader an indication of how each will handle these new challenges.
One of the primary differences between children’s fiction such as fairy tales and young adult fiction such as Every Soul a Star is the ending. Children’s fiction moves inevitably to a happy ending—a sense that the characters, their conflicts overcome, can now look forward to a “happily ever after.” For older kids, such an ending can seem unearned. Every Soul a Star has less a happy ending and more an optimistic ending. The Epilogue promises modest but important growth for each character after the three weeks at Moon Shadow: Ally will leave the campsite, the only home she has ever known, with a smile; Bree will begin her life at the camp open to its possibilities; Jack will return to his old school and join the Art Club. These endings speak to the critical growth each character has achieved. As Jack says in his bittersweet goodbye to Ally, “I wish you clear skies” (322), a sentiment Mass extends to the reader in her closing Author’s Note.
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By Wendy Mass
