Jelly: Reject of The Stars

16-year-old Angela "Jelly" Abate has never been to Germany before. At least she thinks she never has. She trusts Mamma, who says it is her first time on a plane at all. She has to trust Mamma; Jelly's oldest memory is of six weeks ago. Before that, it's a blank expanse of nothing. So she trusts that she'd been having discipline problems. She doesn't probe about the rips in pictures of her childhood, where she assumes her absent and never-discussed father once was. She believes Mamma when she says that the relocation will be a blessing in disguise, that it will give her chance to start over from her trouble.

Auntie Anja's death, the reason for their departure to Dusseldorf, was as unexpected as it was mysterious. On the day that Jelly regained her memory, the erratic and unpredictable second cousin was found impaled through the trunk of a Cherry-Blossom tree 6000 miles from her home two weeks after being reported missing by her frantic daughter. Because she and Mamma grew up like sisters, Mamma considers it her duty to travel abroad to care for the woman's senile mother and her two adolescent children: Bubbly, old-fashioned 14-year-old Wren and 18-year-old Hale, her artistically-talented but unfriendly brother. The last thing they expect in this turbulent time is the appearance of an 18 year old boy, identical to Hale, who calls himself Cole and claims to be the boy's twin. Could he have anything to do with the strange messages that Jelly is receiving from an unknown boy, possibly a forgotten lover with the secrete behind her lost memory?