REVIEW: Graffiti Moon

         An artist, a dreamer,
                         A long, mean, night

    Prod dets

Graffiti Moon
Series: Stand alone

Pub: 2010, PAN Macmillan Australia

Author: Cath Crowley

Cat: fiction,

Format: paperback (mid); 264pp

Age Range: YA                                                 

            Synopsis

Let me make it in time. Let me meet Shadow.

The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growling from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers.

It’s the end of Year 12. Lucy’s looking for Shadow, the graffiti artist everyone talks about.

His work is all over the city, but he is nowhere.

Ed, the last guy she wants to see at the moment, says he knows where to find him. He takes Lucy on an all-night search to places where Shadow’s thoughts about heartbreak and escape echo around the city walls.

But the one thing Lucy can’t see is the one thing that’s right before her eyes.

     my Thoughts (review) 

I think this is the first book that I truly got. I’m not completely sure if it’s because I get the full graffiti thing. The love for their art, the need for secretive and more so the difference in their eyes when it’s about the art. And not just the adrenalin that comes from the illegal act.

Or maybe (and probably the real reason) it was because she wrote it in a way that got you all understanding. Got you thinking the way they thought. Got you looking out there eyes and seeing the difference and understanding it.

So simply this book is...brilliant, beautiful. About a chick and her first date getting a second chance.

It’s written in three voices. Lucy, Ed and Poet, the parts between Lucy and Ed are the main parts and overlap each other in someplace making us have to have the same words spoken between them twice but it’s so....perfectly done that it’s....I don’t know—shit, sorry, my brain is ain’t working for me at the moment, but it’s an amazing story.

Even more so for the fact that the relationship between Ed and Lucy. I like that it was there originally there, that like for each other, that...passion!? And yet with a bad first date, that like came crashing down, until they were thrown together again. They find out that what they once thought could be between actually was. And what was there was pretty impressive, if only a shadow wasn’t mashed between them.

There’s a wicked line that I liked saying just that:

Instead of two people in the middle of us there’s only one. Shadow, and I’m him so it’s almost just her and me.

The way the relationship developed between them was great. It felt real, awkward and so right it has you holding your breath waiting to find out how it ends.

The support characters were great too. They were as well developed as the main ones, making you wonder how they were doing right along with the main characters—hell, maybe a little more.

It was a beautiful book. Very much like a work of art painted on a neglected side of a building you pass on the train on the way into the city. That piece of art you never get to truly see because of the angel and momentum of the train but it’s the one thing you always look forward to every time you pass it.

Magnificent.

A long way around the fact that I loved it, but I think I liked it more because it really was Victorian (the state, not time period). Or at least it’s a book that suits out state of art!!

It’s beautifully written. The story truly told and if ever you’ve a chance to read it you should grant it with both hands. 

[1 days later] I figured out the real reason that this works. It’s because of the way the writing flow around each other. Like a couple of fish mating (I guess, never actually seen that, so I can’t be completely sure). The words, the sentences, them as two people flow around each other in a way that makes you feel what they feel. It also works because they think the same, though they have different thoughts, and different feelings, they have the same way of walking through like, ones just happier than the other. And so it just works, the way they are with each other makes it as if you are listening to music threw a painting.

And even if you don’t quite understand what I mean by that, you will understand the story; in your own way, with your own outlook on things, because that’s what art is. interpreting what others are feeling and making it your own.

☼☼☼