Plot
Penny and Mary are sisters living together in a tenement apartment in a seedy section of an unnamed city. The responsibility of caring for fifteen-year-old Mary has fallen on Penny due to the death of their parents years before.
Mary has cystic fibrosis, and the deterioration of her lungs is rapidly worsening. Forced to spend most of her time indoors, she has tracked her life and dreams and hopes in an artistic scrapbook which she calls her "Book of Stars and Lovely Things." In it, she fashions herself an astronaut, cut adrift in space and slowly and helplessly drifting towards the sun and her eventual doom. Penny is a once-promising poet who has turned to a life of drugs and prostitution to help numb her from the grim reality of her job and the impending loss of her sister.
There is the quiet young man who has moved in next door. He is from war-torn Eastern Europe and walks with a limp. Penny gets a letter from a prisoner, who was moved by her poetry and writes her admiring letters. She won't answer, or even read the letters, so Mary does it for her.
Mary arranges things and events to keep her sister human. Together, they all face life, death, and the universal need to reach out for someone.
Read more about this topic: The Book Of Stars
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)