Brooks, Martha - Two Moons in August
Thu, May. 12th, 2005 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterI'm so glad I found this in the library! I used to read this back in middle school, in the Point paperback edition from those Scholastic book orders. Those were life savers, especially when you lived in a country without too many English bookstores.
I was almost scared to reread it, because I had liked it back then. It had a certain something, a restraint that I had liked, and I didn't want to reread to find that it didn't hold up through the years.
But it's still good. I am glad.
It's 1959, and Sidonie's mother has been dead for nearly a year. Her sister Bobbi tries to take her mother's place, her father avoids the house and pretends nothing is wrong, and there's a new boy next door -- Kieran. I hate providing synopses for these kinds of books, because there's not much of a plot. It's mostly just the characters interacting with each other.
I hadn't noticed back in middle school how well Brooks captures 15-year-old Sidonie's voice and vocabulary, probably because my voice and vocabulary was something like that ;). But she does, and I like Sidonie, who's awkward and hurt and lonely. Kieran is also hurt; his parents are divorcing and his father is an alcoholic. Both of them are attracted to each other; neither is quite sure how to deal with it. There's something in how they interact and in how all the characters interact that really bring the book to life. Sidonie and Kieran are each unsure enough and make all the jerky, nervous motions toward each other so that they feel like real people.
Underlying everything in the book is a sense of loss -- Sidonie's family is lost without her mother, Kieran isn't sure of his own place in life or even of himself.
Anyhow, now I am irked it is out of print, because I want a copy of the Point paperback edition again.
I was almost scared to reread it, because I had liked it back then. It had a certain something, a restraint that I had liked, and I didn't want to reread to find that it didn't hold up through the years.
But it's still good. I am glad.
It's 1959, and Sidonie's mother has been dead for nearly a year. Her sister Bobbi tries to take her mother's place, her father avoids the house and pretends nothing is wrong, and there's a new boy next door -- Kieran. I hate providing synopses for these kinds of books, because there's not much of a plot. It's mostly just the characters interacting with each other.
I hadn't noticed back in middle school how well Brooks captures 15-year-old Sidonie's voice and vocabulary, probably because my voice and vocabulary was something like that ;). But she does, and I like Sidonie, who's awkward and hurt and lonely. Kieran is also hurt; his parents are divorcing and his father is an alcoholic. Both of them are attracted to each other; neither is quite sure how to deal with it. There's something in how they interact and in how all the characters interact that really bring the book to life. Sidonie and Kieran are each unsure enough and make all the jerky, nervous motions toward each other so that they feel like real people.
Underlying everything in the book is a sense of loss -- Sidonie's family is lost without her mother, Kieran isn't sure of his own place in life or even of himself.
Anyhow, now I am irked it is out of print, because I want a copy of the Point paperback edition again.