As a Program of Liberal Studies major, the scope of what I’m reading on any given day rarely (if ever) strays into the 21st century. Recently, however, as an assignment for an elective Gender Studies class that I’m taking, I read a YA novel called When the Moon Was Ours. While I appreciated reading this novel because of its content and message, I was also very excited to be reading a product of this century! Although the bubble of academia that surrounds us at Notre Dame is exciting and intellectually stimulating, it is often dense and serious. While reading When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore, I was reminded of a younger self who devoured books and was able to immerse herself within their stories. In this same spirit, I decided to write a short summary of When the Moon Was Ours, in order to convince someone to pick it up, or any other YA novel for that matter, and get lost in the magic of reading as it once existed. Do I sound like a childish idealist? Definitely. But maybe we all need a little more unbridled naivete and wonder in our lives.
In the novel When the Moon Was Ours, Anna-Marie McLemore infuses a rather traditional bildungsroman structure with purposeful and magical imagery. The two main characters, Miel and Sam, are initially identified by static “defining” characteristics. Miel, a young woman with a past as murky as the water-tower water from which she emerged, is known throughout town as “a motherless girl who came from the water tower and grew roses from her wrist, a girl whose skirt hem was always a little damp” (McLemore 113). Samir, or Sam for short, is known for constantly painting images of the moon and hanging them around the town. The townspeople call Sam “Moon” and Miel “Honey,” for her favorite food. Miel and Sam have been best friends ever since the day Sam coaxed Miel from the water, but they begin to develop romantic feelings for each other. The cast of characters surrounding Miel and Sam’s relationship consists of Anacely, Miel’s caretaker and healer of lovesickness, Yasmin, Sam’s mother and sole parental figure, and the Bonner sisters, “one organism in four pretty, blurred-together bodies” (McLemore 259).
Miel and Sam’s budding relationship is complicated both by Miel’s struggle to comprehend her past (always present in the roses that grow from her wrists) and by Sam’s struggle between the name (Samira) that is on his birth certificate and his male identity. All the while, the Bonner sisters, realizing that the influence of their beauty is limited, become obsessed with the belief that they need to steal the power of Miel’s roses. In order to coerce Miel to give up her roses, they threaten to make Sam’s birth certificate public. The conflicts of the novel begin to nest within one another; the internal identity struggles of both Miel and Sam, Sam’s fraught navigation between the gender he is and the gender he was assigned at birth, the complex feelings and physical barriers involved in Miel and Sam’s relationship and the consistent external antagony from the Bonner sisters.
Ultimately, the nested conflicts all come to a head in the final scene when Miel and Sam face the Bonner sisters. Sam has revealed his true gender to his mother, Miel has discovered that Anacely was once her brother Leandro (providing her with the ultimate key to the mysteries of her past) and, both characters having resolved their internal conflicts to this extent, Sam and Miel are able to confront the Bonner sisters. The Bonner sisters’ desire to identify both Sam and Miel using one reductive piece of their identities (for Sam, the name on his birth certificate and for Miel, her roses) is proved impotent. The sisters’ stained glass coffin, used previously to imprison Miel, shatters and “all [the] broken pieces, becom[e] a hundred thousand unmapped stars” (McLemore 260).
This image of broken pieces is key to understanding the central theme of the novel. In presenting characters that possess both distinguishable “othering” characteristics and internal definitions of identity, McLemore pushes the reader to question their conception of what it means to define identity. Can identity be defined through gender? Cultural background? Talents? Likes and dislikes? The answer to all of these questions is yes and no simultaneously. Identity is defined, in a holistic sense, as the culmination of all identity markers as well as each one individually. As the shattered coffin image illustrates, human identities can be considered as made of countless pieces of shattered stained glass. Each piece is a distinct color and can be used as a lens through which to see the individual as a whole. However, considered together, the many “broken pieces” represent the individual, constituted as a universe of “unmapped stars.”