When The Moon Was Ours


 

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A 2017 Stonewall Honor Book
Winner of the 2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature
A Junior Library Guild Selection
A 2017 Rainbow List Top Ten Book
A Kirkus Best Book of 2016
A Booklist Best Young Adult Book of 2016 
On YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults List
 

To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseperable. Roses grow out of Miel's wrist, and rumors say she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees, and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town.

But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel's skin, and they're willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.

 

Praise for When the Moon Was Ours:

 
Lushly written and surprisingly suspenseful, this magical tale is not just a love story, but a story of the secrets we share and the lies we tell, and the courage it takes to reveal our authentic selves to each other  and to the world.
Laura Ruby, Printz Award Winning Author of Bone Gap

Magical realism at its most exquisite, with a deeply sensual awareness of the intersection of spirit and body. At once visceral and ethereal, McLemore's masterpiece weaves glistening strands of culture, myth, dream, mystery, love, and gender identity into the most magical book I've read in years. This book took my breath away.
Laura Resau, Americas Award Winning Author of Red Glass

McLemore’s second novel is such a lush, surprising fable, you half expect birds to fly out of its pages. 
—The New York Times Book Review

McLemore mesmerizes once again with a lush narrative set at the thresholds of identity, family, and devotion...Luxurious language infused with Spanish phrases, Latin lunar geography, and Pakistani traditions is so rich it lingers on the tongue, and the presence of magic is effortlessly woven into a web of prose that languidly unfolds to reveal the complexities of gender, culture, family, and self. Readers will be ensnared in this ethereal narrative long before they even realize the net has been cast. 
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Amid the ordinariness of the small-town setting, McLemore winds arabesques of magical realism. This imbues the narrative with the feel of a centuries-old fairy tale, while the theme of sexual identity gives it the utmost relevance...a love story that is as endearingly old-fashioned as it is modern and as fantastical as it is real.
—School Library Journal, starred review

"A careful, close look not only at gender identity but at what it is to possess a body...With luminous prose infused with Latino folklore and magical realism, this mixes fairy-tale ingredients with the elegance of a love story, with all of it rooted in a deeply real sense of humanity. Lovely, necessary, and true.
—Booklist, starred review