Secret Star

by Nancy Springer

Fourteen years old, dirt-poor, and unable to remember anything that happened to her before she was ten, Tess is happy living with her wheelchair-bound stepfather, until a scarred young man finds her and starts asking questions about her "real" father

Genres: Fiction

138 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

BIO -- NANCY SPRINGER


Nancy Springer has passed the fifty-book milestone, having written that many novels for adults, young adults and children, in genres including mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magical realism, horror, and mystery -- although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. DARK LIE, recently released from NAL, is her first venture into mass-market psychological suspense.
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Nancy Springer moved with her family to Gettysburg, of Civil War fame, when she was thirteen. She spent the next forty-six years in Pennsylvania, raising two children (Jonathan, now 38, and Nora, 34), writing, horseback riding, fishing, and birdwatching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida panhandle, where the birdwatching is spectacular and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

Reviews

[Tess · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the reviews I found online for this book seemed to have too many spoilers! Otherwise I was going to copy and past a review in here. I read this when I was in 7th or 8th grade and really liked it. Many of the reviews stated that the story was "implausible," but maybe reading as a kid made me believe it more than the adults writing the reviews. Besides, Nancy Springer mostly writes SF&F, so everything I've read by her has a touch of fantastic - if not outright magic. Not to say this book has anything fantasy about it - it's just not surprising to me that her stories seem a bit unbelievable.

This is a story about a girl named Tess who is very poor and lives with her wheelchair-bound stepfather. Tess can't remember anything from her early childhood. Her poverty, as well as her size (she is one of the biggest & strongest girls in her grade) make her a target for teasing and even more serious harrasement. But then she hears a song on the radio that touches her with its passion and pain. And then she meets a scarred, tough looking teenager named Kamo who starts asking her questions that begin to bring up both Tess' and Kamo's pasts.

Overall, I remember loving it, and checking it out from the library several times. I don't know if reading it again, as an adult, I would find Tess' situation "implausible," but then again so many adult romance and thriller novels seem pretty implausible to me now anyway.

[Hannah Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book about a girl named Tess who meets a boy named Kamo who is looking to find out information about his biological father who happens to have the same last name as Tess's father. And because Tess can't seem to remember anything about her life before the age of ten it seems very plausible that these two could possibly be related. Tess starts asking her stepfather questions that he refuses to answer.
This book was amazing, it wasn't always clear where the plot was going so it kept you guessing and the ending was very nice and I actually wish that it had a sequel.

[KarMeka]

Living in a shack with her disabled stepfather, fourteen-year-old Tess feels completely cut off from the life of normal girls: "no money, no boobs, no boyfriend, no smiley face on her report cards, no Walkman no stereo no MTV." Also no mother, no self-esteem--and for some unknown reason, no memory of anything that happened to her before the age of ten. What gets her through the dreary days is a head full of music, "riffs and rhythms that belonged to no one else."