Two Moons in August

image source: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Two-Moons-Martha-Brooks/dp/0747548412

Citation:

Brooks, Martha. Two Moons in August.  Onterio, Canada: Groundwood Books, 2008. Print.

Genre: Romance, Coming of Age

Annotation:

Two August moons mark a horrid month for Sidonie. A year later, her family is still reeling from the events of that month. Just when life seems most intolerable, a new boy moves to town. Maybe things will look up after all.

Nomination Thoughts:

Even though Sidonie’s mother has been sick her whole childhood, her death still comes as a surprise. To make the event more horrible, it was also Sidonie’s 15th birthday. The book’s events are narrated in first person almost one year from the mother’s death. Sidonie’s sister, Roberta, has come home from college to spend the summer at the family’s rural Canadian home. Her father, a doctor, spends all day away from the home. The cat is actually her best and about only friend. Books offer her the only escape from the crushing loneliness and grief.

Then in the middle of all this emotional baggage, a new boy, Kieran moves in across the street. They both have parents who are doctors and their fair share of family tragedies. Even though they got off to the wrong foot, they do form a friendship that keeps teetering to more than that. In 1959, when the story takes place, the best thing to do it hang out at the local lake. It is there they spend most of their time flirting and trying to stay cool... in more ways than one.

There are a number of things that work well in this book. The family dynamics are fascinating and intriguing. Each of them is dealing with the loss of the mother in their own isolating ways. It feels as if acknowledging their grief with each other would shatter them so they ignore it. Yet, it sits squarely in the middle of every conversation, dinner and fight. Sidonie’s flashbacks to her mother’s life and death add just the right amount of tear jerking without becoming sappy. As the story moves, there are watershed moments when finally the family (aunts and all!) come together. The bottled up grief is like a tangled ball of yarn that finally is fixed up to be neat and tidy- the loss remains but the reconnection with family members makes it more bearable.

As Sidonie is working her way through her family’s dysfunction, she does make a friend who becomes her boyfriend. I thought this part of the book was weaker. The love interest’s tension and sparks never seemed to hit the same crescendo of the grief aspect. Kieran and Sidonie do best when Kieran revels why his parents do not live together and how he struggles to not make the same mistakes. Those are the tender moments I wanted to see more. I think so much of the book’s emotional energy was focused on grief, loss and isolation that to truly tackle the budding romance adequately, the book needed to be longer than 160 pages.

The characters, setting and plot do come together in a perfectly fine story. This is another book I find to be more than compelling enough to include on the classroom YA bookshelf but not up to muster for our final Printz Award.

Nomination?

No.