When the Stars Go Dark

“On Christmas morning when I was eight,” Anna recalls, “I woke up early in our apartment in Redding to find my mother wasn’t in her bed in her room, wasn’t home at all” (62). Eight-year-old Anna Hart does not understand yet, but she and her siblings have been abandoned. Although Anna tries for several days to provide her siblings with some sense of “normalcy” (she explains the lack of Christmas presents because an ice storm in the North Pole delayed Santa), neighbors summon the police. In short order, the three are dropped into the foster care system, separated from each other, and taken from the only home they have known.

In interviews after the publication of When the Stars Go Dark, author Paula McLain spoke candidly of her own experience in the foster care system and how, for her, the novel was always more than a mystery thriller, more than a police procedural. The novel offered her the opportunity to investigate the trauma of a child placed into foster care and how, no matter how resilient or courageous the child might be, the experience burdens them with emotional weight they carry into adulthood. In deciding to invest herself in Cameron’s case, despite her struggle with her guilt over the death of her daughter, Anna emerges as a kind of wounded healer, a caring and giving heart able to understand Cameron because Anna also lived through the trauma of foster care. That Anna as a child eventually came to find the care and support of Hap and Eden cannot obscure the half dozen other foster homes she endured for more than two years, a time of anxiety for her own well-being as much as for her younger brother and sister, now separated from her protection and care.

In her difficult journey toward emotional redemption and her own kind of second chance, Anna comes to feel a deep tie with Cameron Curtis: “Her file,” she says, “is like seeing a version of [my] own” (78). Cameron’s story of being placed in the foster care system when she was only four—for Anna, “a particularly tender age” (77)—touches Anna because of her own experience at the age of eight of being put into foster care. Her mother died of a heroin overdose, and her father was in prison for armed robbery. Much like the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a well-thumbed copy of which is in Cameron’s school locker, Anna and Cameron experience what Anna calls the “whiplash of displacement” (77). In a single traumatic moment, Anna and Cameron both lose their identity, their sense of security, and their perception of their self-worth. She understands that Cameron, “[i]n a single day, a car ride with a social worker, her old family was erased, blotted out, and new parents appeared from nowhere” (77). The bond Anna feels for Cameron develops from this shared trauma. Because of decisions other people made for them, they both ended up feeling “deleted” (78), expected to reboot their lives with little explanation and no reassurance that a similar kind of tectonic upheaval would not happen again. Both characters must adjust to dark feelings of abandonment and jarring dislocation and must contend with the daunting task of recreating their identity, their sense of family, their friends, their home. Though she never met Cameron, Anna feels part of the missing girl’s history.

In exploring the impact, emotional and psychological, of children in foster care, When the Stars Go Dark is part of a contemporary subgenre of crime novels that deal with abandoned children and orphans. The subgenre has no doubt been encouraged by the plethora of talk shows and talk radio that explore the hot-button topic as well as by the reach of social media, websites, and podcasts that have brought the topic into a cultural discussion.

Notable books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the realities of foster care include Bonnie Sue Hitchcock’s The Smell of Other People’s Houses (2016; a teen novel shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal); Tanita S. Davis’s Peas and Carrots (2016; YA novel); Brent Hartinger’s The Last Chance Texaco (2011; teen fiction); and Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s Three Little Words (2007; memoir). These books offer heroic stories of children whose negative experiences in foster care allowed them to emerge as stronger adults with insight into the empathy required to care for others.