Moonlight Becomes You

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"Moonlight Becomes You"
by Kasey Cox

(originally published in Gazette at the end of April 2012)


As the “supermoon” climbed over the horizon a week ago, on Saturday evening, May 5, I watched with awe and appreciation. When the moon is at its perigee as it was this May 2012, it is actually at the closest point in its elliptical orbit around the Earth. At perigee, the moon is nearly 50,000 kilometers closer to Earth than when it is at its apogee, the furthest point in the moon’s oval orbit path. The perigee moon of this past Saturday, therefore, appeared 14% ‘bigger’ to us and up to 30% brighter, according to NASA’s “Science at Nasa” public education videos.

Folklore, popular beliefs, and everyday anecdotes abound concerning the effects of the full moon. People swear more babies are born; ambulance drivers, EMTs, and police are busier; animals yowl restlessly; and everyone is subject to “lunacy” in one form or another. Books and movies continually reinvent the story of the werewolf – tormented by the return of the full moon, ravaging the community around him.

With her latest book, The Next Full Moon, author Carolyn Turgeon gives readers a different story woven with the moon’s phases, using a less well-known folk tale. All of Turgeon’s books have the tone of magical realism, where the mundane and realistic blend seamlessly with the fantastic and magical. Like two of Turgeon’s other novels, The Next Full Moon is a contemporary take on an old fairy tale.

Turgeon’s novel Mermaid has its roots in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’; Godmother is a new twist on the old Cinderella story. The Next Full Moon uses the legend of the swan maiden. Most cultures have a story similar to the swan maiden, in which a woman, who is able to shapeshift into a magical creature by using an enchanted cloak. The animal she changes into differs by the geographical location of the culture that created the legend: in some stories, the maiden changes into a fox, a crane, a seal, a buffalo, or a dove, instead of a swan, but the motif remains the same. The maiden falls in love with a human man, marries him, bears his children, but eventually, despite her love for her children, she returns to her life as a magical being.

The Next Full Moon has none of the darker elements that many stories of the swan maiden include. Twelve year old Ava Lewis’s father didn’t trick his wife into marrying him, or hold her captive by stealing her cloak of swan feathers. The story of Ava’s parents is a true, bittersweet love story, perfect for the tween and teen readers for whom this book was written. Ava was always told that her mom died when she was three, and that one of the ways her father copes with his loss is by going flyfishing by the light of the full moon. Though Ava is horrified to find herself growing feathers, all the initial teen angst about body changes and boy’s reactions and peers’ teasing, eventually transform, like Ava herself, into something more wonderful.

Perhaps what is most endearing and wonderful about The Next Full Moon is Ava herself. Turgeon has created a fresh, realistic character, who speaks, thinks, worries, and reacts like we would expect a twelve-almost-thirteen-year-old girl to do. Readers will be charmed to know Ava, and believe that she could walk right out of the pages of the book into the local middle school… and, thus, we can relate to Ava, even as she finds the magical parts of her family’s story.

Thanks to author Carolyn Turgeon, I will no longer think of werewolves, or the ER, or of crimes being committed on the night of the full moon. Since I read her new young adult fantasy, The Next Full Moon, upon seeing the bright, gorgeous orb rising in the night sky, I will smile and think of lovely swan maidens.