Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

The Halloween Moon

The Halloween Moon by Joseph Fink (Welcome to Nightvale, Alice Isn’t Dead) is a middle grade fiction tale about a single Halloween night that takes a very long time. It was reminiscent to me of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury in that same spirit of a spooky book for young readers that really does its best to celebrate being young. I actually went back and reread The Halloween Tree after reading The Halloween Moon because of it. The main plot concerns Esther Gold, a young Jewish girl in a gentile town who in many ways feels separate and has a ….gentle sprinkling of bullying and being ostracized, while delicately skirting over the heavy implications of references to her Judaism being an alienating force in the town. Esther finds solace and acceptance through her love of Halloween. She wins the school costume competitions every year, knows the best horror movies, and pins much of her personality on her love of Halloween, this community activity which she more or less brings her visibility to her classmates. Of course there is an actual Queen of Halloween who isn’t particularly pleasant and Esther’s parents have issued the challenge that she is now too old to go trick or treating. This is a very sweet, shorter novel for young adults about losing those elements of childhood that once defined you, as you instead learn to define yourself. I think, in a child-friendly way, without slapping you over the head, it gets to the root of why so many people gravitate toward horror and fantasy and science fiction under circumstances of feeling separate and ill defined within the ominously beige ‘larger society’, and frames how overcoming those demarcated lines is a part of growing up.