Ginny Moon
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Told in an extraordinary and wholly unique voice that will candidly take you into the mind of a curious and deeply human character. THE ORIGINAL GINNY MOON is a compulsively readable and touching novel about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and making sense of a world that just doesn't seem to add up.
Told in an extraordinary and wholly unique voice that will candidly take you into the mind of a curious and deeply human character.
For the first time in her life, Ginny Moon has found her ?forever home? – a place where she'll be safe and protected, with a family that will love and nurture her. It's exactly the kind of home that all foster kids are hoping for. So why is this 14–year–old so desperate to get kidnapped by her abusive, drug–addict birth mother, Gloria, and return to a grim existence of hiding under the kitchen sink to avoid the authorities and her mother's violent boyfriends?
While Ginny is pretty much your average teenager – she plays the flute in the school band, has weekly basketball practice and studies Robert Frost poems for English class – she is autistic. And so what's important to Ginny includes starting every day with exactly nine grapes for breakfast, Michael Jackson, bacon–pineapple pizza and, most of all, getting back to Gloria so she can take care of her baby doll.
GINNY MOON is a compulsively readable and touching novel about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and making sense of a world that just doesn't seem to add up.
?Ginny Moon is a brilliant debut. In asking us to identify with a developmentally delayed, autistic teenage girl and her peculiar obsession, Ben Ludwig set himself an Olympic degree of difficulty, but he succeeds with the extraordinary Ginny Moon. I was unable to put the book down as I willed her to overcome the obstacles within and around her. Ben Ludwig is a fine observer of human dynamics, and his sometimes dark sense of humor means that the emotional journey, challenging as it is, never becomes wearing. I was mightily impressed–this novel has all the elements for critical and popular success!? –Graeme Simsion, New York Times bestselling author of The Rosie Project
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ludwig's excellent debut is both a unique coming-of-age tale and a powerful affirmation of the fragility and strength of families. We meet 14-year-old Ginny, who has autism, as she settles into life with a new "forever family" and unexpectedly reconnects with Gloria, the abusive, drug-addicted mother from whom she was taken away at the age of nine and Rick, the father she never knew. The rediscovery unsettles the tentative bond Ginny's forged with adoptive parents Maura and Brian, exacerbates the teen's heartbreaking fears for the "baby doll" she left behind, and ultimately triggers a wildly heroic, secret plan to run away to Canada with Gloria and Rick. Ludwig brilliantly depicts the literal-minded and inventive Ginny whose horrifying past and valiant hope for the future are slowly unveiled and the alternately selfish, sympathetic, and compassionate adults who would do anything to get Ginny to choose their love. "I just wish someone would talk about what a delightful young lady she is," a frustrated Rick says. "We're trying to keep her apart from everything... but I think what she needs is to be closer to people."
