Kayleigh frequently calls for standard or “school” English for the reports she demands, and her journaling is always clear-voiced and her letters and emails to an astrologer who never writes back are heartbreaking.

Still, the story is engrossing and unpredictable. The author’s choice to make the emails realistic by interspersing a few slang terms and abbreviations is uneven and inauthentic (either use 'u' or you, but stop having the same character alternate - either spell it out, or don't! Argh!). As an entertaining and lighter subplot, Kayleigh tries to determine her professor’s sign through process of elimination. Friendships develop and are challenged as truths are revealed, and two of the three teens don’t take the project seriously, skewing the results and testing the scientific method Kayleigh is required to follow. Mixing issues of identity and mortality, Hrdlitschka shows that everyone has secrets to hide. She convinces her professor to let her study astrology and asks her fellow online classmates, all Leos, to track their horoscopes and report back to her as to the accuracy of the predictions. Told in emails, journal entries and horoscopes, this story of a group of distance learners helping a ‘net friend with her science project tackles the adage that 'on the internet, everyone is a dog.' Fifteen-year-old cancer patient Kayleigh is a Gemini who writes letters to her twin on another plane (one that she isn’t eager to join). I would recommend this book to anyone who understands and takes passion in the Sun Signs. I found the book not so appealing to be because I don't really under stand the Sun Signs.

Sun Signs is a compelling story that examines the danger of blind faith in an electronic age and the ease with which our identities, in the absence of traditional clues, can shift and change. As Kaleigh struggles with the effects of chemotherapy and radiation, she is forced to examine the assumptions she has made about others and the manner in which she presents herself to the world. What starts as a collaborative and supportive project based on the scientific method, slowly becomes unwieldy and then flawed when it is apparent that all the project participants are hiding vital clues about their identities. Developing a science project on astrology, Kaleigh enlists other online learners as study participants. So she tries to complete her classes online through a correspondence program.

The book 'Sun Signs' is about a fifteen year old girl named Kaleigh Wyse who is unable to attend normal school while she is battling cancer.

Sun Signs by Shelley Hrdlitschka