Book Review: The Moon Without Stars by Chanel Miller

Schools are messed up self-contained microcosms. If you ever went to one, you’ll know what I mean. Unless maybe you were one of the cool kids for whom the ecosystem worked to make you into a deity among mortals, and you’ve never felt the need to look back and wonder whether it all really made sense. Regardless of where you fell in the inevitable and inscrutable hierarchy of school as a 12-year-old, it’s likely you’ll find something that resonates in The Moon Without Stars.

Luna Noon is not one of the cool kids. She spends all her free time with her one friend, Scott, who is basically the nicest person in the whole world. When Scott crafts a handmade tombstone for a distraught classmate’s deceased guinea pig and the class’s jock/heartthrob/class clown Kyle slips on it and breaks his ankle, Scott moves from being a matter of indifference to the target of abuse.

Meanwhile, Luna takes possession of a dead classmate’s library, which she uses to become ‘a book doctor’, finding books that address and help to heal her peers’ troubles and insecurities. Then Luna and Scott start a two-person zine publishing house, specialising in texts to uplift and strengthen those around them.

By this point, this reader was sold. Anything that focuses on the power of literature to expand the self in ways that are illuminating, enriching and healing has my heart and my approval.

Sadly, Luna then gets conscripted, not to say exploited, by the queen of cool kids, June, who turns Luna’s writing talents to the dark side, producing ‘fix-its’ – vindictive lists of people’s failings – in the name of honesty and self-improvement. The seduction of popularity does its thing; Scott gets abandoned; Luna turns into a horrible person who gives up on book-doctoring and zine-writing.

It doesn’t end well.

Sure, Luna sees the error of her ways finally, and we get the beginnings of a reconciliation between her and Scott. But it feels like too little, too late, and while there’s nothing terrible about the bulk of the book being about Luna’s life post-popularity, it turns what was shaping up to be quirky and cool, if perhaps on the saccharine side (but doesn’t this world need more sweetness?), into something predictable and, for this reader at any rate, unfulfilling.

Lauren Hough recently complained that young adult fiction is a nonsense whose existence seems to be a marketing ploy to generate money from a churn of identical and identically poor texts (I’m paraphrasing). The Moon Without Stars isn’t poor. But it would have been a lot better if it had tried harder to be good fiction than to be good young adult fiction.