Under the Same Stars

Summary

From infamous author of fanfiction Rose Christo comes a touching audiobook memoir that adds depth and humanity to what might otherwise have been an inconsequential story of bad writing.

Under the Same Stars is a heartbreaking and wryly hopeful memoir of surviving the NYC foster care system—and how one girl's “masterpiece of literary disaster” (io9.com) connected her to a community that could help her find her lost brother.

In the early 2000s, Rose Christo was separated from her five-year-old brother and shuttled between foster homes in Brooklyn to the Bronx and back again. Desperate to be reunited with her sibling, she traveled the five boroughs, unable to find any trace of him, as New York state’s child care agencies failed to help her time and again.

Then, with the help of one beloved foster sister, Rose created an infamous piece of Harry Potter fanfiction titled My Immortal, posting it online under the pseudonym XXXbloodyrists666XXX. The “forty-four chapters and 22,000 words of hysterical, typo-laden hyperbole” (BuzzFeed.com) went viral as the most notoriously terrible fanfic ever read by the community. For years, fans, writers, and editors researched, debated, and contested the story’s origin and its mysterious author: was this grammatically-challenged rant actually written by a suicidal Goth teenager named Tara Gilesbe living in Dubai, or was this a hoax perpetrated by a group of professional authors making fun of fanfiction?

The truth is a gripping, compelling, and surprisingly funny story of how a young girl infiltrated and used the fan fiction community to search for her brother by baiting their attention with a deliberately badly written tale, creating a ten-year mystery that garnered pop culture media attention and remained unsolved—until now.

This audiobook will appeal to anyone who feels that their life has been significantly changed by a work of fiction.