Fiction Review: The Half Moon

In February, I finally read Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane, as a Buddy Read, with a Booktube friend in Singapore (my review at the link). She and I both loved the intricate family drama and really enjoyed discussing it. So, I was thrilled when I spotted Mary Beth Keane on the author list for Booktopia, an annual event I attend each spring! I read her more recent novel (now out in paperback), The Half Moon, and found it to be another winner.

Malcolm seems to be living his dream, owning a bar called the Half Moon where he has worked since he was a young man, talking and laughing with familiar patrons each night, and married to the love of his life, Jess. But underneath the surface, there are several storms brewing. As the novel opens, a real-life winter storm is headed toward Gillam, NY, (the same town as in Ask Again, Yes). In the last hours before Malcolm closes the bar for the approaching storm, he gets some devastating news about Jess, who left him months earlier, saying she needed time to herself. When Malcolm awakes the next morning to find the power is out and the entire town is snowed in, he also gets a visit from the police who tell him that one of his bar's regulars has disappeared. And only a few people, including Jess, know that Malcolm and the bar are in deep financial trouble. It's the perfect storm, as all of these crises collide in one freezing cold, snowbound week in a small town.

While the present-day action all takes place over a week, flashbacks and characters' memories fill the reader in on all that led up to this week: how Jess and Malcolm met fifteen years ago, their hopes and dreams, their long struggle with infertility, the history of the bar, and what Jess has been doing since she left Malcolm. There are plenty of intriguing plot twists here, but as in Ask Again, Yes, the focus is on relationships and the characters' interior lives. In particular, this novel explores midlife, with all of its joys and sorrows, routines and disruptions, surprises and disappointments, all within a small town setting where everyone knows everyone else. I love this kind of emotional complexity in a novel with such layered real-feeling characters. Malcolm and Jess are dealing with a lot, and things seem pretty dark in the middle of the novel, but Keane wraps it up perfectly. I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful, warm story about relationships, changes, and forgiveness. I can't wait to meet the author this weekend!

296 pages, Scribner

Simon & Schuster Audio

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