A  moonglass pendant,
Some childhood memories,
Innumerable questions –
All that Anna has left of her mother.

Tumbled roughly in sand and waves for countless months and years, seaglass goes from sharp shards to a smooth and frosted beauty. Anna’s mom always called it “moonglass” as she found the best pieces while walking the beach during a full moon.

Losing her mother as a toddler, staying away from the seaside town where Mom grew up, returning at last with her father – maybe the tossing and tumbling of her life will finally stop for Anna, maybe she’ll find out why her mom died, maybe she’ll finally stop running away from memories and find herself.

This is the paperback cover to look for at the independent bookstore; your local library may have the darker blue hardback edition.

What do you search for when you walk along the beach?
**kmm

Book info: Moonglass / Jessi Kirby. Simon & Schuster, hardcover 2011, paperback 2012. [author’s website] [publisher site] Review copy and cover image courtesy of the publisher.

My Book Talk: Mom just walked away from her, walked away from her toddler daughter waiting on the beach, walked into the waves and never came back out.

When Dad’s job takes them back to the beachside town where her parents met and fell in love, Anna thinks that the years following her mother’s death might not keep unhappy secrets buried deep enough, so she keeps her distance from Dad, from people at her new high school, from the shore lifeguards.

Running helps Anna meditate away (well, ignore) her problems and worries, so she tries out for the cross-country team, cheered on by her new sorta-ditzy friend Ashley who truly does think that retail therapy and meditation can fix anything. Having to move in the middle of high school stinks… but being able to hear the waves every night, the same ocean that her mom listened to growing up, that counts as a small plus.

Dad has strictly warned Anna away from the beach lifeguards who work for him at the state park – after all, he was a lifeguard with quite a reputation here at this same park as a teen, where he met her mom, where they lived as newlyweds.

But Tyler isn’t the crazy lifeguard, like Dad was, and he helps Anna explore some of the old cottages left vacant when the seashore became a state park. Maybe some clues about Mom can be found in the neighbors’ left-behind bits and pieces…

Why won’t Dad tell her more about Mom and their past?
Can Anna reconcile what she thought she knew about her mother with what people in her mom’s hometown are remembering?
Why would Mom just walk away, under the moonlight, into the sea?  (One of 6,000 books recommended on www.abookandahug.com)