Moonglass

Moonglass
Jessi Kirby
Simon & Schuster, 2011

I won a signed copy of Moonglass over at The Elevensies blog, and once it arrived, I swooned a little. The cover looks nice in the image, yes? You’ve not seen anything yet. In person, holding it in your hands, it shimmers. Yeah, I said it: It shimmers. We are talking *gorgeous* here. And, happy day, the story lives up to the cover’s smashing good looks.

The beach. A cute lifeguard. Sea glass. Dilapidated old beach cottages. The call of the water. Ghosts of the past. Unanswered questions. With ingredients like this, Jessi Kirby had a recipe for an amazing story, and she delivered. Anna has spent the last nine years struggling with the truth of her mother’s drowning. When her father accepts a transfer to Crystal Cove, she fights the move away from home, but then decides maybe a fresh start is a good thing. Until reminders of her past – actually, reminders of her pre-history, when her parents met – start surfacing and refuse to be silenced. Not even the cute lifeguard, Tyler, or her surprising new friend Ashley can block out the visions in her memory. As she begins to settle into life in Crystal Cove, finding a rhythm and pattern that fit, Anna slowly realizes that she can’t keep running from the past – that sometimes you can’t move forward until you stand and drag everything out in to the open. It’s painful, it’s messy, and it very nearly costs her her life (how's that for a teaser?). But at the same time, it’s oh-so-freeing.

Anna’s story has plenty of raw emotion. Moonglass is a fast read, but it’s not always an ‘easy’ one – it will get your heart involved, and make you stop and think a bit about what’s really important in life. It is a good story however, and as Anna fights against her own memories, she discovers that others’ lives have been similarly shattered – that she’s not going through this wholly alone. Kirby presents Anna’s struggle in a believable way: it’s not an easy, overnight ‘fix’ – rather, there’s a series of progressions, and even at the end, everything’s not magically ‘all better’, but it is better. In a day and society when so many young people are going through painful parts of life, it’s good to have a realistic portrayal of the journey. Moonglass is a wonderfully written debut novel that I think will have a positive impact on readers.

Book provided by my personal library.