Shooting Stars

New Zealand author Brian Falkner published his young adult novel Shooting Stars in 2016. Following the coming of age genre in which an innocent ventures into a treacherous new environment, the novel is the plot-driven story of a teen boy raised in the Kiwi bush who is forced to adapt to life in civilization. Written primarily as a series of diary entries made by the protagonist, an aspiring writer, the text is also interspersed with poems, short stories, police reports, court transcripts, and drawings. The story takes place over four months and is divided into three sections—each covering a discrete period in the main character’s life.

In the novel’s first section, we meet fifteen-year-old Egan Tucker. When he was a baby, his mother, Moana (whom he calls Moma), fled an abusive marriage. Since then, the two of them have been living in a miner’s cottage deep in the Coromandel Peninsula forest, along with a dog named Jack. Egan has grown up never having seen TV, the Internet, electricity, or indoor plumbing. He fishes and grows most of their food (though his mother does sometimes go into a nearby town to buy supplies), has never left the small valley that surrounds the hut in which they live, and has never spoken to anyone other than his mother. His mother’s plan is to live with Egan like this until he turns eighteen. Then, he will legally be an adult, and his father won’t have power over him even if he ever found his son.

In the bush, Egan has learned how to read and write—in his diary, he describes his love of writers like Hemmingway and Steinbeck, whose styles he sometimes tries to imitate. His mother has also raised him according to a code she has cobbled together from ancient Greek philosophers, Judeo-Christian beliefs, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Boiling the ideas down into a list of thirty rules, Moma has instilled in Egan that a life lived by the Code is key to making the world a better, happier place. The rules will sound familiar to readers— “always do your best to keep someone from getting hurt” and “do at least one nice thing for someone else every day”—and as Egan writes entries in his diary, he frequently ends them by writing about one of the Code’s rules and his relationship to it. The Code is also included in list form as an appendix to the novel, implying that Falkner urges his young readers to adhere to them as much as possible.



One day, while trying to hunt down the wild pig that keeps destroying his vegetable garden, Egan gets into serious danger and meets the first new person he has ever seen in real life: J.T. Hunter, a deer culler from the New Zealand Department of Conservation. J.T. rescues Egan, and they become friends.

Near Christmas, Egan’s mother makes another of her regular supply trips but never comes back. Just like that, the boy’s world is turned dramatically upside down. After scouring her documents for clues about where he should go to find her, Egan takes a letter that mentions an uncle from the city of Auckland, cash from the lock-box in their cabin, and the determination to find either the uncle or, preferably, J.T.

The second part of the book follows Egan as he makes his way to Auckland. The culture shock is so intense that it takes him quite a while to adjust. Because he has no idea how to go about finding his mother or T.J., he ends up homeless, in a section of the city called the Domain. A group of street kids (Reggie, Mohawk, Junior, and Allan) steals his things, but he eventually ends up making friends with them after showing that many of the skills he learned to survive in the wilderness translate well to living on the street. At all times, Egan continues to follow his mother’s Code of honor, and he soon sees that his commitment to its ideals starts to change those around him as well. After some time, Egan starts to fall in love with Reggie, the group’s sole female member. However, Egan is forced to leave the street kids when, through a series of betrayals and coincidences, his real identity is discovered.



The novel’s third part covers what happens when Egan is reunited with his father, who turns out to be Ray Tucker, a well-known former rugby star who has been looking for Egan and Moana since they disappeared fifteen years earlier. Once again, Egan’s world is flipped on its head as he goes to live with his father and his father’s fiancée, Lauren, in a mansion in Coatesville, a rich suburb near Auckland. The press is excited by this seemingly happy story, and Egan quickly becomes a celebrity requested for TV interviews and whose fame spreads online virally.

Nevertheless, nothing about Egan’s new life feels right, and soon enough, it becomes clear why Moana left Ray in the first place. He grows abusive with Lauren until she leaves, and then Ray turns his anger on Egan. At this point, the diary entries cease and are replaced by video surveillance footage, transcripts from a trial, and several news articles. What emerges is horrifying. In a fury over Egan’s attempts to help Lauren escape and then his refusal to give up her whereabouts, Ray attacks his son with a crossbow, which hits Egan in the leg. Bleeding profusely, Egan runs off into a nearby copse of trees, climbing one to get away from his father. Armed with a crossbow, Ray chases after him and shoots him again. A neighbor comes on the scene just in time to see Egan fall out of the tree with the crossbow bolt in his side. At the trial, Ray confesses and pleads guilty; meanwhile, after a few days in the hospital, Egan dies.

The novel ends with a note from J.T. Hunter imploring readers to not only follow the thirty rules of the Code but also to “Live your life to the full because you never know how long you’re going to get.”