I don’t know how to categorize The Girl Who Chased the Moon. Is it fantasy? Romance? Coming of age? It’s all of these. Sarah Addison Allen also wrote The Sugar Queen and Garden Spells, both also hard to classify.
This is an excellent book, a fast read with memorable characters and just enough plot twists to keep it moving.
All of Ms.Allen’s books are set in southern small towns; all include characters who took a wrong turn somewhere and need to come back and fix it. And all include a dose of fantasy. The Girl Who Chased the Moon includes fantastical wallpaper that changes to match the moods of the girl who lives in the room. There are strange lights that glow on moonlit nights and a continuing sense of things being just a bit awry. Our characters work through the novel to reset those things.
One thing I love about her books is that they have happy endings. No, not everything is perfectly resolved and you can peek around the corner to see that Emily will have the usual high school senior moments, that Stella needs to find her center, that Sawyer and Julia have work to do. But the characters are happy. They found peace and mended the broken relationships.
The Girl Who Chased the Moon has four main characters, Julia and Sawyer, Emily and Win. They have tangled histories, connected through their families. The back stories are left shrouded until the end of the book although we see pieces earlier.
It is this history that must be untangled and set upright. The minor characters are excellent: Stella, Julia’s landlord and friend; Morgan, Win’s father, Vance, Emily’s very tall grandfather, Beverly who is Julia’s rapacious ex stepmother. All are important and all feel like real people. You end up caring about them as much (or more) as about the main characters.
Ms. Allen knows her small town South. She shows the sense of place that is so important to the characters. Not only the geographical place, but the place within the society, the relationships that follow generations. I have never lived in the south but I feel like I have after reading her novels.
I highly recommend The Girl Who Chased the Moon and give it Five Stars.
I got my copy from the library. You can purchase copies of The Girl Who Chased the Moon at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. The links in the post go to Amazon and pay commission.
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