ARC Review: Graffiti Moon

Graffiti Moon

by Cath Crowley

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Purchase: Amazon | BookDepository
Release Date: February 14, 2012
Publisher: Knopf
Age Group: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Source: NetGalley
Rating: Perfect Bed Partner

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About the Book:

Senior year is over, and Lucy has the perfect way to celebrate: tonight, she's going to find Shadow, the mysterious graffiti artist whose work appears all over the city. He's out there somewhere—spraying color, spraying birds and blue sky on the night—and Lucy knows a guy who paints like Shadow is someone she could fall for. Really fall for. Instead, Lucy's stuck at a party with Ed, the guy she's managed to avoid since the most awkward date of her life. But when Ed tells her he knows where to find Shadow, they're suddenly on an all-night search around the city. And what Lucy can't see is the one thing that's right before her eyes.

I pedal fast. Down Rose Drive, where houses swim in pools of orange streetlight. Where people sit on verandas, hoping to catch a breeze. Let me make it in time. Please let me make it in time...

Graffiti Moon is like a dream that entraps your consciousness and urges you to leave reality, and all it's difficulties, behind. Crowley's soft whimsical flow of writing are luminous clouds in a bright blue sky, something beautiful that, when you stop to pay attention and really look, sweetly lulls the mind and heart. It's as if Crowley took the world we live in and put it behind another pair of lenses, granting us a heartachingly wonderful view of the same place only with infinitely more color and vibrancy, a precious place that we wish we didn't have to abandon for our own. For the first time, things cease to seem ordinary and the characters are little points of light that stand out even among all the charm already present in the fancifully written setting. They are weird and fascinating and dazzling, and they never give us a reason to want to escape them. They are open books themselves that constantly tug on our sympathy and ignite our smiles, leaving us with a burning need to see them all happy by the end.

Lucy wants Shadow. Once, Shadow had wanted her. She just didn't know it then... Lucy and Ed can be so opposite yet they share similarities that aren't easily observable, to us and between each other. Lucy is strong-willed, dreamy, optimistic, and even naive, and grabbing the events of the story and trying to focus in on them through her eyes is definitely a fun adventure. Lucy has this way of making us laugh even as we feel something profound, has the ability to cut through the BS and see into the other side. That's what gravitates to her interesting people like ourselves and Ed, the extreme loner-looking guy who has all his words shut in but all the pictures of his thoughts and memories dripping out of his fingertips. Not only is he very cute, but he appreciates art and most of its many faces, has a keen sense of loyalty and a hard strategy on how to show his feelings to others. Lucy and Ed couldn't be a better suited match. The problem? The fact that their first date dropped into a new level of hell and Lucy ended the night in a way that left Ed in pieces of doubt and chunks of disappointment. Their reconnection after these past couple of years is a syrupy progression, with sticky areas of discussion and a slow melting quality.

The other characters were just as thickly characterized, with so much going on inside, and Crowley writes little to let us know it but shows us so much about each person. It isn't a far stretch for us to fall in love with each face and attitude we hang with throughout the novel. The predictable plot was successfully carried out and never once fell and cracked to reveal a familiar dull story. Graffiti Moon is a clever interpretation of a place and storyline we may have seen before, and is also one that's more alluring and beautifully devastating and warm than any I've ever found and enjoyed. Crowley truly has to hatch another sweet, romantic idea told in an equally mesmerizing way as Graffiti Moon.

Lucy looks out the window, staring at something that's in her head, the same way she did two years ago when I watched her. She hasn't changed much except now she's bunching up her hair with paintbrushes. She's still smiling like she's thinking something you want to hear.
"Why do you want to find him so bad?" (25%)

Guest Post: Cath Crowley + Giveaway

About the Author:

Author of A Little Wanting Song (Chasing Charlie Duskin), Graffiti Moon and the Gracie series. Cath lives in Melbourne, Australia and is writing her next book. You can also find her at cathcrowley.com.au.

I'm currently reading Graffiti Moon and it is beautiful so far; oh gosh, THE WRITING. I'm so happy to have Cath Crowley here today for Valentine's Day. Please give her a spectacularly warm welcome!

CC: I get up early in the morning to make new characters. I like to write in dream-slicked skin, before I’m fully awake. My computer faces the window and I can’t see anything but shapes of plants in darkness.

What do you love? I ask them over and over but they don’t tell me.

The click of words, loud sun, shade, figs, trees with branchy armpits, mystery novels, romances, birds, shadows, flight, sun? What, what, what?

It takes all day before I get an answer that I think might be true.

‘Corners,’ a boy says. ‘I love the corners.’

I write it down and wait for something else. I eat quite a bit of chocolate while I’m waiting. They won’t even tell me if they like chocolate.

Who doesn’t like chocolate? I write for something to write.

‘Me,’ one of them says. It’s a girl. Both of them are seventeen, I’m sure of it. I think she has a bit of an attitude. I’m not sure she likes me.

Do you know each other?

‘Yes.’

Have you kissed?

‘No.’

Do you want to?

No answer.

I give up and go to bed.

I get up in the dream-slick and try again.

Today, before the sun, I pull one memory out of the girl.

She’s lying on the grass shining a torch tunnel at the sky. Looking for words in the stars, I think, but I’m not sure. She has a light blue dress with a white bird sewn onto the corner and a dog with three legs lying next to her. He’s called Fat Harvey. She loves Harvey but he’s dying. He’s got the wise look of a dog that’s close to the other side. She swings the light around and makes the stars look like they’re something she can control but she knows she can’t.

I’m writing a lot of Valentine’s Day posts this week so I ask her about love because it’s on my mind. Because I think it might be on her mind too.

She moves the torch around and tells me about a boy she kissed at a party last night. She snuck out her window and cut through the trees and arrived at the same time as her friend. ‘It was a coincidence,’ she tells me.

They went inside.

She skips the house that the party is in. She doesn’t tell me who is holding it.

She takes me out to the back yard where there’s a clothesline and a boy underneath. I can see the stars and the shape of shirts and trousers hanging.

She tells me he is the best-looking boy in the class and I can see that. He plays sport but I don’t know what. His hair is black and his eyes are green, I think. The moon isn’t bright enough to see.

She kissed him that night and thought of another boy, an ugly boy. He’s crooked and strange and no one at school talks to him except her. She talks to him in secret, though. His voice is honeyed gravel.

‘I imagined,’ she tells me, ‘that while we kissed that I could taste honey.’ She imagined that she was in a corner, kissing someone else. The crooked boy. She calls him Crow.

Somewhere, Crow is hiding in the corners. I have the start of him though.

I have the start of them both.

And in the quiet of the mornings I know that if I am patient, I will find them.

---

This post was absolutely beautiful, Cath! Thank you so much! And Cath continues to be amazing by offering up a copy of her book!

Be sure to to catch my review for Graffiti Moon later.

Senior year is over, and Lucy has the perfect way to celebrate: tonight, she's going to find Shadow, the mysterious graffiti artist whose work appears all over the city. He's out there somewhere—spraying color, spraying birds and blue sky on the night—and Lucy knows a guy who paints like Shadow is someone she could fall for. Really fall for. Instead, Lucy's stuck at a party with Ed, the guy she's managed to avoid since the most awkward date of her life. But when Ed tells her he knows where to find Shadow, they're suddenly on an all-night search around the city. And what Lucy can't see is the one thing that's right before her eyes.

Purchase Graffitti Moon today!

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