Saturday, April 26, 2014

Review: Maggot Moon

Title: Maggot Moon
Author: Sally Gardner
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Year Published: 2013
Source: Library book
Rating: 4/5 stars

I wasn't sure what to expect from Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner. I picked it up because it is a Printz Honor book this year, and I'm making my way through the YALSA Hub Challenge. I was intrigued by the cover and the description, but really had no idea what I was getting into.

Standish, the main character, is an odd duck, and he describes his dystopian world in a way that is strange yet heartbreaking. The reader spends much of the book thinking about Soviet Russia, but is that really the world this is taking place in? The Motherland is about to land on the moon for the first time, but Standish and his Gramps are among the few who know what's really going on.

While I found the story compelling and Standish to be a great narrator, what won me over about Maggot Moon was the simplistic sentences that still managed to knock me over. Case in point: "Gramps was the only person that still pulled at the gravity in me." That one sentence speaks volumes about their relationship, and I found myself rereading that one line over and over. It was the tiny gems like that that made me really appreciate this book.


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