Half-Moon Scar
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Allison Green's edgy novel Half Moon Scar, three childhood friends reunite as adults to confront their painful pasts and heal each other's emotional and physical wounds.
Amy, a lesbian academic, returns to her small Midwestern hometown of Willow Bay, Wisconsin after years away. She discovers that her old friends Gina and Gavin have learned to cope with their pasts in extreme ways that rival her own tendency toward self-mutilation. As Amy fears for Gavin's life, grappling with his anorexia, she becomes increasingly bewildered by Gina's detached behavior.
With past and present colliding, the reunion forces all three to examine the shame and guilt they experienced as gay adolescents. Amy must reconcile her tense family relationships, long-standing attraction to Gina, and past romantic experimentation with Gavin. Together, they confront the visible and invisible scars that pervade their still-unresolved lives in this raw exploration of queer identity, mental illness, and the lingering impact of adolescent trauma.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The childhood events that shape our lives inspire Green's competent if thin first novel. Amy, a tenured lesbian professor of political science in Seattle with a lover pressuring her for a commitment, returns to her hometown in Iowa to regroup. She finds that little has changed. While the town of Willow Bay has sprouted new housing developments and her parents have redecorated, the emotional landscape is much the same as that of her childhood. Her sense of stasis is at once confirmed and shaken when she visits her teenage crush, Gina, still a distant tomboy. A new development is Gina's roommate, Gavin, who has returned to Willow Bay after a long absence. Gavin, for whom Amy used to shoplift lipstick, has changed in one significant way: he is terrifyingly thin. Amy's research in the university library reveals that anorexia in men is associated with troubled sexual identities: Gavin is sick because he's gay. The sexual nature of his problem is emphasized when everyone who sees him initially thinks he is suffering from AIDS. Similarly, Amy has a habit of cutting herself in moments of crisis. The self-mutilation is rooted in her lesbianism: she is ashamed of her feelings, and bleeding somehow lets the shame out. Gavin and Amy's responses to their homosexuality are extreme, and their motivations remain oddly uncomplicated. It is no coincidence that their self-destructive tendencies are expressed in behavior commonly associated with teenagers: unlike their present and past lovers, they have not grown into their sexual identities, though it is not clear why they are so immature. In a terse prose style, Green offers a story of growing up, of the perils of desire and of the exorcism of childhood woes.
