WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW
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| “It’s like I left the original me behind when I came to live with my new Forever Parents. With Brian and Maura Moon. My name is Ginny Moon now but there are still parts of the original me left.”- Ginny Moon, Benjamin Ludwig |
Told in an extraordinary and wholly unique voice that will candidly take you into the mind of a curious and deeply human character.
For the first time in her life, Ginny Moon has found her “forever home”—a place where she’ll be safe and protected, with a family that will love and nurture her. It’s exactly the kind of home that all foster kids are hoping for. So why is this 14-year-old so desperate to get kidnapped by her abusive, drug-addict birth mother, Gloria, and return to a grim existence of hiding under the kitchen sink to avoid the authorities and her mother’s violent boyfriends?
While Ginny is pretty much your average teenager—she plays the flute in the school band, has weekly basketball practice and studies Robert Frost poems for English class—she is autistic. And so what’s important to Ginny includes starting every day with exactly nine grapes for breakfast, Michael Jackson, bacon-pineapple pizza and, most of all, getting back to Gloria so she can take care of her baby doll.
Ginny Moon is a compulsively readable and touching novel about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and making sense of a world that just doesn’t seem to add up.
For the first time in her life, Ginny Moon has found her “forever home”—a place where she’ll be safe and protected, with a family that will love and nurture her. It’s exactly the kind of home that all foster kids are hoping for. So why is this 14-year-old so desperate to get kidnapped by her abusive, drug-addict birth mother, Gloria, and return to a grim existence of hiding under the kitchen sink to avoid the authorities and her mother’s violent boyfriends?
While Ginny is pretty much your average teenager—she plays the flute in the school band, has weekly basketball practice and studies Robert Frost poems for English class—she is autistic. And so what’s important to Ginny includes starting every day with exactly nine grapes for breakfast, Michael Jackson, bacon-pineapple pizza and, most of all, getting back to Gloria so she can take care of her baby doll.
Ginny Moon is a compulsively readable and touching novel about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and making sense of a world that just doesn’t seem to add up.
This is not a kind of book I would normally pick up, but I wanted something a little more... lighthearted then the books I've been reading lately. The synopsis made it sound like the kind of quirky A Man Called Ove-esque books that deal with heavy topics, yes, but end up completely capturing your heart regardless. Ginny Moon does have that in spades, but it also is a much darker and even frustrating at times book to read.
The frustratingness doesn't at all come from the writing style, or maybe a little bit. It's very simplistic and is meant to make us feel like we're in Ginny's head. I can't speak to the accuracy of how well Ludwig portrays autism, I don't have autism nor am close to anyone who does, but I also haven't heard anyone offended by the way the book is written. No, instead I found myself getting aggravated by Ginny's actions and the inability of her adoptive parents to understand her. I suppose in that respect it's very realistic and probably many people who adopted special needs children could relate to this, but as a story it gets old very quickly.
But Ginny Moon does have strengths, and the character of Ginny is the strongest. I could tell Ludwig genuinely cares about doing her character justice and showing all aspects of her personality. While she does have an aptitude towards math, she isn't at all an autism stereotype. Instead, she feels like a fully fleshed out character, and as much as she sometimes frustrated me, I couldn't help but like her anyway.
That being said, I wasn't as crazy about the other characters, who didn't strike me as being as fleshed out as the titular character. However, this might actually work in the book's favor. Ginny has a very surface-level understanding about other people and other situations, and so it makes sense that other characters that aren't her would be viewed in such a superficial light.
Ginny Moon is a solid book and one I'd definitely recommend to the endearingly quirky reads crowd. It's not perfect, but it's a nice enough read.
8 out of 10
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