Book Review: The Song That Moves the Sun

The Song That Moves the Sun by Anna Bright (HarperTeen, 2022)

It was the title, with its echoes of Dante’s Divine Comedy, that drew me to this YA novel. And the book has Dante connections for sure—he’s even a character in one of the storylines—but it has much more than that. The interplanetary adventures of the four teenagers in Bright’s story have a strong flavor of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The author also draws on the works of C.S. Lewis, as she hints in an amusing little shoutout during the story, and talks about in more detail in the Author’s Note at the end. In short, this book is a mixture of all kinds of good things, along with some valuable elements that are all Bright’s own.

The Song That Moves the Sun shifts between two timelines, one beginning in the present day in the Washington, D.C., area (not far from my own neck of the woods), and the other in 13th-century Italy. The Italian part reworks the story of Dante and Beatrice, as both of them flee unwanted responsibilities and team up with Marco Polo to explore outer space. And in 21st-century America, teenage best friends Rora and Claudia are unwittingly dealing with the fallout from what Dante and Beatrice did.

Rora, an anxious person to start with, has been deeply traumatized by a mugging, while Claudia is upset over a rupture with her beloved twin brother. They’re at a concert at the 9:30 Club (hey, I know roughly where that is!) when two boys named Amir and Major suddenly show up out of nowhere, with a wild story about coming from another planet—and a wild plan to fix not just what’s wrong with Rora, but also the entire solar system.

The story relies heavily on medieval ideas of astrology and astronomy (this is where some of Lewis’s ideas come into play). In both timelines, the characters, traveling among the heavenly spheres, have to summon all their wits and courage, and urge each other onward, to find the answers they desperately need. The 13th-century story moves slowly at first but turns into something truly poignant, as the explorers, so eager and inspired at first, allow their flaws to pull them away from each other and lead them in wrong directions. With the stakes much higher in the 21st century, the teens have to both follow the wisdom of their ancestors and try to undo the mistakes that those ancestors made. They learn to draw strength from each other instead of isolating themselves, a lesson that will have important implications from their mission. The four teens couple up rather quickly, but the romance is sweet, not steamy, and friendship and family relationships are shown to be just as powerful and just as important.

I love stories like The Song That Moves the Sun (and A Wrinkle in Time, and Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and so on). They give me hope. And yet they leave me a little sad as well—sad that fixing what’s gone wrong in the universe isn’t as simple as finding a door to another planet and battling the entity out there that’s poisoning everything. Not that the travel and the battles aren’t arduous, but there must be great satisfaction in being able to pin down the entity, wipe it out, and know that you made things better—the sort of satisfaction that’s all too rare in real life.

But that’s an essay for another day. What matters here is that such stories really do offer genuine hope to us readers—hope that, even if we can’t find an entity to battle, such mundane, everyday things as love and friendship and music and faithfulness and creativity make a difference in the world. We need stories like this, stories saturated with the goodness of these things, and so I’m very grateful for this one.

(Cover image copyright HarperTeen)

Book Links:

The Song That Moves the Sun on Amazon
The Song That Moves the Sun on Bookshop