Moonrise, by Sarah Crossan

A beautifully written, emotional story about broken families, fragile hope, the legal system, the trap of poverty and being *present*. I love Sarah Crossan, I love her gorgeous verse and her carefully chosen words that can be so fragile one minute and devastatingly fatal the next. Verse just seems to suit her stories so well.

Moonrise is the story of Joe and his family. When Joe was seven, his brother was arrested.  Now Joe is 17 and alone in Texas, and he is seeing his brother, Ed for the first time in 10 years. Nobody has seen him since he disappeared with their aunt’s car a decade ago. Since then Joe and his sister Angela have been raised by their Aunt, after their drunk, pharmaceutical addicted mother walked out on them.  Since that time Ed has been in a high security prison, convicted of murdering a young police officer. A death penalty offence in Texas.  Joe has a couple of weeks with the brother he barely knows before he is put to death for something he claims he never did. Nobody has visited, they have barely written. Joe’s aunt has insisted all along that the best thing to do is forget all about Ed- he’s the reason the family fell apart.

I liked the portrayal of the broken Moon family, and Joe’s struggles seemed really real. We start off by thinking that the brothers barely know each other. But the flashbacks that occur throughout fill in some of the brothers’ history: Ed, wayward as he is, was basically both parents to his kid brother- a responsibility that it seems was just too much for someone so young. The story is emphatic that no matter how broken and dysfunctional a family, there is something that holds you together, for as long as you want to be held. No matter how wobbly, no matter how imperfectly. It makes you recognise that it’s a family that brings you up, even if it isn’t parents specifically.

Joe has a lot to work through whilst in Texas; the realisation of his brother’s future, the prospect of being the only family member there when it happens. He struggles with finances, with loneliness. He reflects a lot on his upbringing and who has and has not been there. He also meets a girl at the diner, Nell, that he becomes friends with that helps him through his impossible summer. I liked the presentation of this relationship too- it was fragile and precarious, temporary but significant, kind of unreal. The whole town had a feeling of unreality, a town that wasn’t really anything beside a place that was close to a prison.

The verse really suited this story. It made the narrative seem immediate, considered, bursting with feelings and so honest. Every word seems carefully selected and lovingly curated. Every line feels important, just like every day feels important to somebody on Death Row.

With every Sarah Crossan novel I read, I am more in awe of what she is able to do with words. Though her characters and narrators are often private, insular people, people that are vulnerable and lost, she manages to project them so clearly and so precisely into the reader’s mind that they kind of stay there forever. They are so distinct and so affecting, and I think it must be the verse that does that.