You may easily know who this author is, as he has written over 79 children’s books, or you may be wondering where you may have heard this author’s name before…I’ll give you a hint. One of my favorite books as a child was written by him and it’s about a rabbit. There’s also another book about celery. Any idea yet?
Yes he is the author of the popular Bunnicula series! I remember my mother encouraging me to read this series, and I still have the “Celery Stalks at Midnight” saved for when my daughter is able to read it. I would love to re-read it, for memory sake, but I have to start with the first in the series, “Bunnicula.”
I digress, though, as you’re here to talk about “A Night Without Stars.” The summary on the inside of the book says, “When 11-year-old Maria must go to the hospital for open-heart surgery, she finds strength in her friendship with a badly scarred burn victim.”
After reading, I must say that’s a pretty comprehensive summary. There isn’t truly much to this story, other than the main character Maria experiencing fears over her surgery and what she can expect to the learning about the dynamics of friendship and being kind to one another.
When I researched a bit about the book before I started reading, I saw the word empathy pop out and it encouraged me to dive in. I love when a book can teach children about how to care about others and their feelings. Character education is a must to help us understand our world and our interactions with others.
In the beginning, before the book even starts, you are greeted with a quote by Edith Wharton that really spoke to me: “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Only you can focus on the light you bring to the world – are you going to be the brightest candle for others or help spread the light of others?
The premise behind this book is that a young girl named Maria was born with a hole in her heart and has to have surgery at the age of eleven. She is scared of what can happen during and after the surgery, and she goes through the different emotions she is feeling, still not quite sure of what to think.
Her family is super supportive and helps to keep her calm. Her friends, though, don’t necessarily understand the brevity of the situation and make light conversation around what she is going through. She discusses her thoughts with the patients she meets in the hospital, especially with a boy named Donald who was badly burned in a fire as a young boy, and this helps to quell her fears.
During the surgery, her parents wait in her room, nervous and trying their best to stay patient. The chapter opened with the quote: “Emptiness does not require the absence of all things; it requires only the absence of that which is most needed or desired, that which is most central to one’s existence.” (86) This exemplifies why some people can feel utterly alone, even in a crowd full of people. If you are missing the thing/person you desire the most, you can feel empty and withdrawn. You can feel restless, waiting on that person to arrive or hoping that they will return. I can’t even imagine the feeling her parents must have been experiencing, waiting for their little girl to be out of surgery. The feeling of not knowing when the doctor will open the door to let them know the surgery is complete or even she will make it out alive. What a stressful feeling this must be!!
After surgery, “Everything was fuzzy, out-of-focus. And then, just before drifting off to sleep, one thought came to her with crystal clarity. Looking up at her mother and father standing over her bed, she thought, I made it. I’m alive.” (91) That was one of her fears — that she would either wake up during the surgery or not at all.
During her stay in the hospital, she befriends Donald, the boy who was badly burned. At first, she wasn’t sure what to think of him or how to handle the way he looked. “Maria watched him out of the corner of her eye. She tried to make believe she never seen him before; she wanted to know if the sight of him would still make her feel sick. But it was too late, she was used to him already. She knew he was strange–looking, ugly even, but so what? He was different, that’s all. Like her and her scar. Maybe. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that one yet.” (107)
The other girls in the hospital are incredibly critical of Donald. They call him Monster Man, remark about how ugly he is, and say that he was burned by his parents because he was so mean, which is why his parents tried to kill him. Bonnie and Linda make such horrible comments about him: “Just the sight of him makes me sick. He’s all scars and… yuck, I can’t even describe it without wanting to puke… he’s a freak, that’s what he is.” (50-51) These parts made me cringe…it’s always hard to hear when someone is made fun of for something they have NO control over, especially when it comes to their looks. It’s not his fault he was burned!
When the other girls find out that Maria has been hanging out with Donald more, Bonnie says, “Honey, what you want to hang around with a freak like that for, I sure do not know. If you ask me, they took that hole out of your heart and put it in your head.” (113) Ouch. Seriously, ouch. As if having open heart surgery wasn’t enough, now you’ve got to handle someone making fun of who you decide to be friends with?!
Anyway, I think the author is trying to help those readers who may be going through something similar – either they are experiencing medical issues or they want to understand how to accept someone who is different from them. There are a lot of Christian references, since the family is Catholic, and Maria questions her beliefs during this whole ordeal. She questions his existence, but also thinks of him to to reassure her fears. Maria asks her brother Carlo, “why would God let such a terrible thing happen to Donald?” Carlo responds, “maybe God doesn’t have control over things like that. Maybe God is what is good in people, not what goes wrong in their lives. Maybe in your being friends with him, maybe that’s where God is.” (153)
When she finally is able to leave the hospital, she gives Donald a present – a heart that she had made out of clay to resemble her own. He says thank you but doesn’t have a present for her. “In the long silence that followed, Maria wished that Donald did have a present for her. She wanted something to remember him by. Something to pick up and look at, like her clay heart. And then she started thinking about things she wished she could say. Like how glad she was they’d become friends. Like how much she missed him. But somehow no words were coming, and everything in her head began to feel like a scrambled mess.” (164-165)
When she tells her friends about Donald, they tell her the same things that her hospital friends said; they can’t believe she would hang out with someone who looked the way Donald did. Maria comes to his rescue and says, “just because he doesn’t look so great doesn’t mean he can’t be somebody you can like. I was afraid you guys wouldn’t like me because of the scar on my chest. But you still like me don’t you?… Donald is still a person, just like I’m a person.” (169) People criticize others so often for the way that they look instead of loving them for who they truly are. People try to constantly change others and make them someone their not…and for what?
Maria writes Donald a letter to see how he is doing after he left the hospital. He writes her back and she reads his response while traveling in her bother’s new car. In the letter he says, “You are the best friend I ever had.” When Maria looks up to see where they are driving, she notices they are on a “ordinary block, just like all the others in her neighborhood, but to her it seemed just then as if it had been cleaned to a shine and was drying in the midday sun.” (175) This implies how beautiful the letter made her feel and how it impacted the way she saw the world. Donald had also written her a poem:
The sky was endless black that night
Dreamy, dreamless black
Without a ray of light
Without a star
And I could see…nothing.
Then…I did not know how or why…
Stars began to leak through the night sky.
First here, then there
Pinpricking the heavens
Letting the sleeping son sleep through.
And the blackness was flooded with light,
Night became brighter than the brightest day.
I held up my hands
Waves in about in the star–struck way
Of a person who is blinded by the joy of seeing.
And for the first time in that long, dark night… I could see (175-176)
Oh, young love. How sweet it is.
All in all, I think this was a very sweet read – good for young minds to see the importance of befriending someone who looks different from you and to see what it feels like to go through medical problems, especially at such a young age.
I’ll give it 3/5 stars. How about you – have you read it? What did you think?
Grab your copy of the book on Amazon!