Skip to main content

Review: The Moon Without Stars

Image
By
The Moon Without Stars
By Chanel Miller
New York: Penguin, 2026. Fiction. 256 pgs.

After unexpectedly inheriting a collection of books, seventh grader Luna Noon starts to lend out books to help her classmates with their middle school problems. Books to help kids after the loss of a pet, books to boost self-image, and books to quiet fears. When she doesn't have the right book to help a specific classmate, Luna, aided by her best friend Scott, creates her very own "literary prescription" - a zine with advice to help her classmate. Unexpectedly, the zine becomes a huge success, and is the key to propel Luna into middle school popularity. Soon, she ditches Scott and becomes a part of the mean-girl crowd. Her helpful zines become "fix-its" with harsh, biting critiques of her peers and it is clear Luna has lost sight of herself in her quest to belong.

This sensitive and emotional novel is best suited for upper middle grade readers. Luna and her peers have a lot of questions about growing up and entering adolescence, and this book processes the emotions around them in a realistic and direct way. From periods to peer pressure, this book shows the inner fears of middle schoolers and the cost for trying to fit in. Luna is an incredibly relatable and sympathetic character who is dealing with a distant father and a bipolar mother on top of navigating sleepovers, make-up, and menstruation. Her sensitive thoughts and feelings make this book extra special. Already one of the buzziest books of the year, Chanel Miller writes another winner.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more