Not even las gringas bonitas are immune to the strict rules of behavior a misogynistic society imposes on them, but instead of recognizing this, they instead turn on Miel. They maintain their power because physically they fit into white standards of beauty, but when Chloe, the eldest sister, gets pregnant and leaves town for the duration of her pregnancy, their power starts to crack. Until recently, the Bonner sisters had been the most beautiful and powerful girls in Miel’s unnamed town, powerful because of their beauty - their pale skin, their thin frames, their red hair – and its ability to make any boy fall in love with them. Enter the Bonner sisters, the town’s four beautiful white witches – las gringas bonitas – and Miel’s conflicted adversaries throughout the novel. The world is not an un-dangerous place for Sam – nor for Miel. While Sam does not have to come out to his community at large, he does have to contend with his own conception of his gender and its fluidity – what would it mean to live life as a boy only until he is grown? And what if – as he suspects – the gender of “woman” never feels right to him, even when he is older? McLemore handles this conflict with a light and reverent touch Sam’s narrative never feels contrived or inauthentic. His identity as a trans boy, however, is culturally unique: he is raised as one of the bacha posh, a Pakistani tradition in which the youngest daughter in a family with no sons is raised as a boy until she is of marrying age. It is also understated Sam’s coming out is not fraught for the reader – it is just who he is. There are secrets throughout the book that are slowly and skillfully revealed: the details of Miel’s past are left until nearly the end of the novel, but the reveal that Sam is trans is handled deftly and early on. It’s a beautiful love story between two characters who are ineffably lonely, but who shimmer unceasingly with love for each other. They understand each other immediately, and without words. Sam, the boy who befriends her in front of the whole mystified town, spends his life caring for her and painting paper moons that he strings up in the trees for her whenever she is upset. Miel, whose name means ‘honey’ in Spanish, is a girl who emerges from a rusted water tower with roses growing from her wrists, shivering with the repressed memories of her past. It was exactly the type of novel that I would have loved as a young reader–full of fairy tale elements, like witches, curanderas, and glass pumpkins, and characters with mystical, mysterious beginnings. Within the first few pages of When The Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore, I felt the dusty corners of my teenage heart start to sing. ‘When The Moon Was Ours’ by Anna-Marie McLemore
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