Anna-Marie McLemore

Anna-Marie McLemore’s debut novel The Weight of Feathers was greeted with rave reviews, a YALSA Morris Award nomination, and spots on multiple “Best YA Novels” lists. Now, McLemore delivers a second stunning and utterly romantic novel, again tinged with magic. To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel’s wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel’s skin, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they’re willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up. Atmospheric, dynamic, and packed with gorgeous prose, When the Moon was Ours is another winner from this talented author.

A Novel

When the Moon was Ours

deniz

Aracely had taught Miel that so many things worth fearing-the water, the dark -brought wanting. The river kept this town's fields growing and alive. The dark gave them the stars and the sudden warmth of certain fall nights.

But there were some things only a boy named Samir could teach her(...): that they would both become what they could not yet imagine, and that they would still be what they once were. The girl from the water tower, a rose growing from her wrist, and the boy on the wooden ladder, hanging the moon close enough for them to find.

Made me smile so big I too will dream of moon bears and lamps from now. 

It didn't matter how many stories he and Miel had told each other when they could not sleep, him passing on his mother's fables of moon bears that aided lost travelers, Miel making up tales about his moon lamps falling in love with stars.

They feared that if they were not kind to the beautiful things that grew wild, their own farms would wither and die.

But this was why Sam painted shadows and lunar seas on paper and metal and glass, copying the shadows of mare imbrium and iceanus procellarum— to give her back the moon.

Miel was a handful of foil stars, but they were the fire that made constellations.

I love the star similes Sam makes about Miel; how the boy named Moon finds constellations in his loved one.

He thought he knew her body. He was so sure that he could have drawn it, mapped it as easily as the lunar seas he could paint without looking at a map of the moon. But under his hands, against his own body, she was both safe and unfamiliar. She was a world unknown. She was a place whose darkness held not fear, but the promise of stars.

"They want you for what you can do for them when no one's looking, and then in church they curse you. That's your culture. I pick mine any day."

That was the truth of holding so much back, and then giving up a little of it. The rest came.

Now that he knew Aracely was like him, he understood, and she knew that both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when they were half-full, wearing a coat of shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the creek beds, wearing down the earth. 

Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it. 

When the Moon was Ours quotes

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