I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the blog tour for WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS by Anna-Marie McLemore! I freaking adore Anna and she's a local author so that's another plus! I love supporting my local authors! I have an excerpt from the book to share with you today!
Haven't heard of WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS? Check it out!
Author: anna-Marie McLemore
Release Date: October 4, 2016
Pages: 288
Publisher: Thomas Dunne
Format: Hardcover, eBook
Find it: Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes& Noble | iBooks
When the Moon Was Ours follows two characters through a story that has multicultural elements and magical realism, but also has central LGBT themes—a transgender boy, the best friend he’s falling in love with, and both of them deciding how they want to define themselves.
To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel’s wrist, and rumors say that 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, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they’re willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.s.
Now on to the excerpt!
sea
of clouds
As far
as he knew, she had come from the water. But even
about that, he
couldn’t be sure.
It didn’t matter how
many nights they’d met on the untilled land
between their houses;
the last farm didn’t rotate its crops, and
stripped the soil
until nothing but wild grasses would grow. It didn’t
matter how many
stories he and Miel had told each other when
they could not sleep,
him passing on his mother’s fables of moon
bears that aided lost
travelers, Miel making up tales about his moon
lamps falling in love
with stars. Sam didn’t know any more than
anyone else about
where she’d come from before he found her in
the brush fi eld. She
seemed to have been made of water one minute
and the next, became a
girl.
Someday, he and Miel
would be nothing but a fairy tale. When
they were gone from
this town, no one would remember the exact
brown of Miel’s eyes,
or the way she spiced recado rojo with cloves,
or even that Sam and
his mother were Pakistani. At best, they would
remember a dark- eyed
girl, and a boy whose family had come from
somewhere else. They
would remember only that Miel and Sam
had been called Honey
and Moon, a girl and a boy woven into the
folklore of this
place.
This is the story that
mothers would tell their children:
There was once a very
old water tower. Rust had turned its metal
such a deep orange
that the whole tank looked like a pumpkin, an
enormous copy of the
fruit that grew in the fi elds where it cast its
shadow. No one tended
this water tower anymore, not since a few
strikes from a summer
of lightning storms left it leaning to one side
as though it were
tired and slouching. Years ago, they had fi lled it
from the river, but
now rust and minerals choked the pipes. When
they opened the valve
at the base of the tower, nothing more than a
few drops trickled
out. The bolts and sheeting looked weak enough
that one autumn
windstorm might crumble the whole thing.
So the town decided
that they would build a new water tower,
and that the old one
would come down. But the only way to drain it
would be to tip it
over like a cup. They would have to be ready for
the whole tower to
crash to the ground, all that rusted metal, those
thousands of gallons
of dirty, rushing water spilling out over the land.
For the fall, they
chose the side of the tower where a field of brush
was so dry, a single
spark would catch and light it all. All that water,
they thought, might
bring a little green. From that field, they dug
up wild flowers,
chicory and Indian paintbrush and larkspur, replanting
them alongside the
road, so they would not be drowned or
smashed. They feared
that if they were not kind to the beautiful
things that grew wild,
their own farms would wither and die.
Children ran through
the brush fields, chasing away squirrels
and young deer so that
when the water tower came down, they
would not be crushed.
Among these children was a boy called
Moon because he was
always painting lunar seas and shadows onto
glass and paper and
anything he could make glow. Moon knew to
keep his steps and his
voice gentle, so he would not startle the rabbits,
but would stir them to
bound back toward their burrows.
When the animals and
the wild flowers were gone from the brush
field, the men of the
town took their axes and hammers and mallets
to the base of the
water tower, until it fell like a tree. It arced toward
the ground, its fall
slow, as though it were leaning forward to touch
its own shadow. When
it hit, the rusted top broke off, and all that
water rushed out.
For a minute the
water, brown as a forgotten cup of tea, hid the
brush that looked like
pale wheat stubble. But when it slid and spread
out over the field,
flattening the brittle stalks, soaking into the dry
ground, every one
watching made out the shape of a small body.
A girl huddled in the
wet brush, her hair stuck to her face, her
eyes wide and round as
amber marbles. She had on a thin nightgown,
which must have once
been white, now stained cream by the water.
But she covered
herself with her arms, cowering like she was naked
and looking at every
one like they were all baring their teeth.
At first a few of the
mothers shrieked, wondering whose child had
been left in the water
tower’s path. But then they realized that they
did not know this
girl. She was not their daughter, or the daughter
of any of the mothers
in town.
No one would come near
her. The ring of those who had come
to see the tower taken
down widened a little more the longer they
watched her. Each
minute they put a little more space between
her and them, more
afraid of this small girl than of so much falling
water and rusted
metal. And she stared at them, seeming to meet all
their eyes at once,
her look both vicious and frightened.
But the boy called
Moon came forward and knelt in front of her.
He took off his jacket
and put it on her. Talked to her in a voice soft
enough that no one
else could hear it.
Every one drew back,
expecting her to bite him or to slash her
fingernails across
his face. But she looked at him, and listened to him,
his words stripping
the feral look out of her eyes.
After that day, anyone
who had not been at the water tower
thought she was the same
as any other child, little different from the
boy she was always
with. But if they looked closely, they could see
the hem of her skirt,
always a little damp, never quite drying no
matter how much the
sun warmed it.
This would be the
story, a neat distillation of what had happened.
It would weed out all
the things that did not fit. It would not mention
how Miel, soaking wet
and smelling of rust, screamed into her
hands with every one
watching. Because every
one was watching, and
she wanted to soak
into the ground like the spilled water and vanish.
How Sam crouched in
front of her saying, “Okay, okay,” keeping
his words slow and
level so she would know what he meant. You
can
stop screaming; I hear you, I understand. And because she
believed
him, that he heard
her, and understood, she did stop.
It would leave out the
part about the Bonner sisters. The four of
them, from eight-
year- old Chloe to three- year- old Peyton, had been
there to see the water
tower come down, all of them lined up so their
hair looked like a
forest of autumn trees. Peyton had been holding
a small gray pumpkin
that, in that light, looked almost blue. She had
it cradled in one arm,
and with the other hand was petting it like a
bird. When she’d taken
a step toward Miel, clutching that pumpkin,
Miel’s screaming
turned raw and broken, and Peyton startled back
to her sisters.
Once Sam knew about
Miel’s fear of pumpkins, he understood,
how Peyton treating it
like it was alive made Miel afraid not only of
Peyton but of all of
them. But that part would never make it into
the story.
About Anna-Marie:
¡Bienvenidos! I’m Anna-Marie.
I’m a Mexican-American author represented by the fabulous Taylor Martindale of Full Circle Literary. My
debut novel, THE
WEIGHT OF FEATHERS,a 2016 William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist,
is out now from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. My second novel,WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS, will be released in October 2016,
and WILD BEAUTY is coming in 2017.
My shorter work has been featured in The Portland Review, CRATE Literary Magazine’s “cratelit,” Camera Obscura’s Bridge the Gap Gallery, and by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. I was a 2011 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction (you can find my reading here). I live in Northern California with a boy from the other side of the Rockies.
My shorter work has been featured in The Portland Review, CRATE Literary Magazine’s “cratelit,” Camera Obscura’s Bridge the Gap Gallery, and by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. I was a 2011 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction (you can find my reading here). I live in Northern California with a boy from the other side of the Rockies.
Make sure you grab Anna-Marie's first book too!
