BLOOD MOON is a YA novel about the viral shaming of a teenage girl. During her seminal sexual experience with the quiet and lovely Benjamin, physics-lover and astronomy fan Frankie gets her period – but the next day a gruesome meme goes viral, turning an innocent, intimate afternoon into something sordid, mortifying and damaging.
I love that novels like this are becoming more common now. It has a very good point; period blood is just blood. Almost half the people in the world have periods (based on slightly less women than men in the global population.) I loved how calm and matter of fact Benjamin was about everything, and I was sadly not surprised at how everyone else reacted.
I tore through this book in less than an hour. It's quite a quick read, written in free poetry, but I genuinely couldn't wait to see what was going to happen. I think it was the right length; padding it out any would have felt superfluous, like the author was just trying to hit a word count instead of writing the story as it needed to be told. I love how the writing moves from side to side on the page as different people speak, or act, or as points need to be made.
However, I've taken a point off because I don't believe the principal we saw at the start would have reacted the way he did at the end. It just didn't make sense to me. (Don't worry, points are notional on this blog.)
In every other way, this is an amazing book and I can't wait to share it with people. Books like this are going to help normalise this entirely normal bodily function for a new generation and I can't wait to see it happen.
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