The Moon Without Stars
by Chanel Miller
Zines, popularity, and the price of belonging.
For you if
you were the kid who made things, then learned what it cost to be liked.
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Chanel Miller — who spent years fighting to reclaim her voice after sexual assault — wrote her middle-grade debut for the kid who's about to discover that belonging costs something. When Luna's handmade zines make her suddenly popular in seventh grade, the book doesn't ask whether she'll stay true to herself — it shows what happens when she doesn't, and who gets to decide what that costs. Miller writes female adolescence without the usual editorial protections: menstruation shows up, consent shows up, the way girls police each other's bodies shows up. This is the rare middle-grade novel that treats twelve-year-olds as people with moral complexity rather than storylines to resolve.
Where This Book Lives
- Themes
- belongingcoming of age
Chanel Miller's memoir Know My Name is about reclaiming her identity after the Brock Turner case became one of the defining moments of #MeToo. That she wrote a middle-grade novel next — about a girl who learns that the popular crowd requires you to become someone else — is not a coincidence. The Moon Without Stars is doing the same work at an earlier age, for a reader who still has time to learn it differently than Miller did.
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