The Moon Sisters | Bibliotica

About the book, The Moon Sisters

The Moon Sisters

Hardcover: 336 pages

Publisher: Crown (March 4, 2014)

This mesmerizing coming-of-age novel, with its sheen of near-magical realism, is a moving tale of family and the power of stories.

After their mother’s probable suicide, sisters Olivia and Jazz take steps to move on with their lives. Jazz, logical and forward-thinking, decides to get a new job, but spirited, strong-willed Olivia—who can see sounds, taste words, and smell sights—is determined to travel to the remote setting of their mother’s unfinished novel to lay her spirit properly to rest.

Already resentful of Olivia’s foolish quest and her family’s insistence upon her involvement, Jazz is further aggravated when they run into trouble along the way and Olivia latches to a worldly train-hopper who warns he shouldn’t be trusted. As they near their destination, the tension builds between the two sisters, each hiding something from the other, until they are finally forced to face everything between them and decide what is really important.

Buy a copy, and enjoy the story:

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About the author, Therese Walsh

Therese Walsh

Therese Walsh is the author of The Last Will of Moira Leahy and the cofounder of Writer Unboxed. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two children.

Connect with Therese

Website | Facebook | Twitter

My Thoughts

What does hope taste like? How does love smell? For a synesthete, these are valid questions. Actually they’re valid questions for me, as well, and I don’t consider myself synesthetic at all, merely imaginative. For me, for example, comfort smells like the waxy-metallic-papery aroma of slightly sun-warmed Crayola crayons.

But I digress.

In The Moon Sisters Therese Walsh gives us a lovely, provocative story of two sisters, one of whom is a synesthete, and the other of whom tries to be a pragmatist. Olivia knows what hope smells like, and she’s on a mission to find it – considering it the unfinished business of her recently-deceased mother, while Jazz, responsible for her younger sister, is the practical one.

Author Walsh has given us, in Olivia and Jazz, two incredibly real young women, who seem vastly different from each other, but at the same could never be anything but sisters.

The use of synesthesia could have been a gross malfunction; instead, Walsh has blended lyrical reality with wistful magical realism, and a very human poignance.

I wanted to find the cranberry bog with Olivia, and I also wanted to hold her back, like Jazz. I wanted sit in their kitchen and play synesthetic memes with both women – “What color is friendship? Describe the taste of snow.” Instead, I’ll have to settle for re-reading the book – I was originally given an ARC and the hardcover, final edition came much later – and then devouring Walsh’s other work.

As for The Moon Sisters…my best advice is that you read it, because it will make you see life and death, sisterhood, and even your own senses, in a completely different way.

Goes well with Sun-brewed iced tea and lemon pound cake with fresh blueberries.

This review is part of a blog tour hosted by TLC Book Tours. For more information, and the complete list of tour stops, click here.

The Moon Sisters

With the publication of Therese Walsh’s new novel, The Moon Sisters, the lovely folks over at The Muffin are celebrating sisterhood, and when I heard about it, I had to participate, but here’s the thing: I don’t have any biological sisters. I have a step-sister (sort of) and a few sisters-in-law, but I was an only child until I was twelve, and then I inherited a slightly-older step-brother, so the people I consider sisters are my chosen family, more often than not.

One of them, Cathy, is actually my cousin, but she was my “big sister” for most of my life. It was Cathy who spent hours with me, making home movies that we wrote and performed in, baking and cooking and playing with dolls. It was even Cathy who gave me my first bra. Her mother, my own mother’s cousin, shared her birthday with me, and used to call me her birthday girl, so we had a sister-like bond from the time I was born, really, and while our interests have diverged and our politics don’t always align, she’s family, and she is my sister in every way that counts.

Then there’s my friend Alisa. We don’t really talk much these days, interacting mainly via Facebook (she’s incredible at Scramble with Friends), but when we were kids, my mother sliced our hands (nicked, really) open so we could be blood sisters. We didn’t have headdresses like the girls in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but we did have matching t-shirts when we were seven.

More recently, my spiritual sisters have expanded to include my friend Kathy, who was there for me when I had a miscarriage several years ago while my husband was traveling for work, who knows my dogs as well as I do, and who lets me borrow her children and use them as guinea pigs when I do experimental baking. She’s a visual artist, while I play with words, but we have in common the creative spirit.

Does it matter that none of these women are technically related to me? No. In fact, I think the case could be made that all women are sisters at some level, though some of us are closer than others. This is why it drives me crazy when women don’t support each other. No, we all don’t think alike, dress alike, behave alike, but there is far more that unites us than divides us, and I think we should embrace that.

Which brings me to this awesome new novel by Therese Walsh – The Moon Sisters. Here’s a bit about the book:

In The Moon Sisters, her second novel, Therese Walsh wanted to write about one sister’s quest to find will-o’-the-wisp light, which was her mother’s unfulfilled dream. Also called “foolish fires”, these lights are sometimes seen over wetlands and are thought to lead those who follow them to treasure. Despite the promise, they are never captured and sometimes lead to injury or even death for adventurers who follow them. The metaphor of that fire – that some dreams and goals are impossible to reach, and that hope itself may not be innately good – eventually rooted its way into deeper meaning as the Moon sisters tried to come to terms with real-world dreams and hopes, and with each other, in their strange new world.

Olivia and Jazz Moon are polar opposites: one a dreamy synesthete, able to see sounds and smell sights and the other controlling and reality driven. What will happen when they are plunged into 24/7 togetherness and control is not an option? Will they ever be able to see the world through the other’s eyes and confront the things they fear the most? Death. Suicide. The loss of faith and hope. Will they ultimately believe that life is worth living, despite the lack of promise?

The writing of The Moon Sisters was a five year journey and at times author Therese Walsh felt like it was her own “foolish fire”. But remember, some fires are worth the chase!

I haven’t read it yet – though I have it sitting on my to-be-read pile (look for my review on March 20th), but it sounds like a truly fantastic story for anyone who has a little bit of magic left in her soul, or who has shared a secret with a sister, even if she is a sister of the soul, and not one of blood.

If you want to be among the first to read The Moon Sisters, you can buy it from Amazon.com, on Kindle or as a physical copy. (I love my Kindle, but I miss trading books with my friends when I only read ebooks.)

You can also find out more about the author, herself, by visiting her website: ThereseWalsh.com where you can find book club information, a personality quiz based on characters in the novel, and much, much more.

Also, don’t forget to stop by The Muffin and enter to win a copy of The Moon Sisters for yourself. Read it, then pass it along to your own sister. It’s nice to share.