Susan Lynn Meyer

This week’s moment of literary joy (well, really there are two today!) comes from Shana Burg’s Laugh With the Moon (Delacorte 2012), a middle-grade novel about an American adolescent, Clare.

Clare has recently lost her mother and is taken, unwillingly, to live in Malawi by her physician father. Clare overcomes her initial strong resistance through a friendship with Memory, a Malawian girl, and her younger brother, Innocent, and through evolving relationships with her other Malawian classmates. In this powerful, moving novel, Clare’s initial, painful isolation gradually gives way to a sense of commonality in human suffering, community, connectedness, and hard-earned joy (laughing with the moon). It’s a beautiful book.

Here are two moments I especially loved.

This sentence, on p. 23, in Clare’s voice:

“One boy sits on a branch, his bare foot dipping into the sky like it’s a lake.”

So nice. That sentence conveys the boy’s comfort in the world, and the continuity between water and air. It makes me of Thoreau’s “time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” There’s something beautifully light and confident and free about that boy in the tree.

And then there’s this striking image, as Memory talks about her sense of connectedness with the people she has lost:

“Each night I watch the moon. The moon is our light in the dark. In this moonlight is the light of my family” (p. 220).

Ah. Yes. That passage really hit home for me. Reading it, I realized that there’s a similar passage in my new novel, Skating with the Statue of Liberty. In a moment of unbearable grief, Gustave sees the moon rising over Brooklyn and feels inexplicably comforted. My sister helped me at a very difficult time by telling me about how she felt when she saw a rising moon.  Remembering this helped me figure out how to end this chapter in which Gustave is suffering terribly.

What is it about the moon and grief?  Has anyone else reading this felt comforted by the moon?