Ms.McBride does an excellent job explaining the personality of Moth and how she sees the world. This is one of the few books that I have ever read that made the protagonist different and quirky without making it seem forced.
The only real disappointing factor in this novel was that the big, climactic finish of the book dropped the emotion and some figurative language that was so prevalent in the rest of the book. I’m not a psychiatrist, but that seems to describe chronic psychosis, where a patient suffers from auditory/visual hallucinations. Sani throughout the book calls his mind fractured and constantly swarming with thoughts and sometimes, these thoughts can intrude on what he thinks and sees as real. Despite this slight annoyance, the style of writing and word organization in stanzas instead of paragraphs only reinforces how the main characters of Moth and Sani think compared to everyone else. The book, as stated above is organized like a collection of poems, and this style of writing did throw me off a little when dialogue between two characters was put on other sides of the page. After meeting Sani, an equally minded individual to Moth, they set up a relationship and go on a road trip through the United States and an internal monolog ensues about each location. During her daily rhythm work and dancing to the “music of the world”, she meets Sani, a troubled boy with problems with addiction and pills, likely because of his neurodivergence. While Moth was raised by her grandfather, who was a rootworker and shaman after his death, she was raised by her aunt Jackie, who was abusive if not negligent to Moth. This spirituality and poetic mind led to the conception of Me (Moth), a young adult poetry book about Moth, a black/Native American woman with a long scar on her face and chest. Mermaid because of her blue-dyed hair and obsession with mermaids, sirens, and Mama Wata. “The universe is, after all, 95% dark energy and dark matter it would be strange to trust the 5% of reality.” Amber McBride.
Before her career as a professor and author of young adult novels, she was raised by her African American family to be deeply spiritual in a tribal manner, believing in ghosts, spirits and all things that she couldn’t see. McBride was always a poet at heart, working as a media assistant at Furious Flowers poetry institute, the most prevalent black poetry academy in the U.S.
Written in August of 2021, Me (Moth) was written by Amber Mcbride while she was teaching at Virginia State University.
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