The Book of Stars (1999): Cast & Plot

Penny and Mary are sisters living together in a tenement apartment in a seedy unnamed city. With their parents long dead, the elder sister Penny shoulders the heavy responsibility of caring for her younger sister, who is fifteen and fighting a rapid decline from cystic fibrosis.

Inside their cramped home, Mary spends most of her time indoors, turning her life, dreams, and fragile hope into a vivid scrapbook she calls the Book of Stars and Lovely Things. In its pages she fashions herself as an astronaut adrift in space, slowly pulled toward the sun and a doom that feels inevitable.

Penny is a once-promising poet who has turned to prostitution and drugs to numb the ache of watching her sister slip away and to cope with a harsh present.