Black Star, Bright Dawn

PLOT: In the book Black Star, Bright Dawn, a girl called Bright Dawn enters the Alaskan Iditarod bobsled race. After her father suffers an accident, she has to go instead of him. She faces many problems on the way, and although she makes it last of all the remaining racers, she is still proud of herself.

CONFLICT: The main conflict in the story is that when Bright Dawn is almost near the end of the Iditarod race, she accidentally veers off course, and gets stuck on what turns out to be an island that floats away while she is stuck on it. While Bright Dawn leaves Womengo to the next checkpoint, Unalakleet, her lead dog does not want to go any further, and when they go back, the same story happens there. So when she goes out to explore, “I went forward cautiously, holding the end of the rope… A few steps beyond, the trail came to an end. Beyond its jagged edges I saw deep water through the mist. I had been cut off. I was on an island of drifting ice.”

CHARACTER: The main character in the book, which is also my favourite, is Bright Dawn. She is the daughter of Bartok, the man who is supposed to race for Ikuma, but has an accident. Thus Bright Dawn is chosen to race instead of her father. The two men that have funded Bartok’s “would be” race say that they will think about if Bright Dawn can race or not, and when they do not come back after a few days, Bartok has a vision: “ ‘They will come tonight,’ he said. ‘They have decided. You will run in the big race.’”

THEME: the theme, or moral, of the story is that whenever something bad happens, you still have to find the good side in it. When Bright Dawn finishes the Iditarod race, last, of course, Mr. Weiss, one of the funding men, comes up to her, and tells her “Don’t forget that you finished the race. Thirty-six mushers out of the seventy-one who started didn’t finish.” He shows her in this way, that it is not completely horrible that she finished the race last – there is still a good side in it.

CRITIQUE: This book, Black Star, Bright Dawn, is an exceptional realistic fiction novel that captures your imagination in every chapter. It does not have any period in the book where the reader can loose interest even the slightest bit. For example, when Bright Dawn reaches any of the required checkpoints, the author does not describe what she did there, unless it is really intriguing. If it is not, she goes right on to the next tense part of Bright Dawn going through various problems to reach the next checkpoint. However, one of the book’s weaknesses is that some of the facts are not explained in great enough detail than it could be. The author seems a bit too eager to jump on to the next subplot in the story, that she misses a few facts that would have intrigued the reader even more than they already did. I would recommend this book for students in grades one through eight, because the language it I written in will be slightly too easy and childish for anyone beyond these grades. However, it is not the fact that the author cannot write normally, it is the fact that most of the book is a translation from Eskimo. This is a language that, if translated, would actually seem a bit lacking grammar. But this book is well written, and would be interesting to anyone, that is why I recommend it.