Undressing the Moon

This book is so beautifully written that I gave it an extra 1/2 of a star. In some places it's almost like reading prose poetry. The story is heart-wrenching and yet empowering as well. It is told from the point of view of a very ill young woman, who shares how she came to be in her emotionally 'broken' state. It sounds like a maudlin topic, but the book is anything but.

I will definitely read more books written by Tammy Greenwood.

Just a warning. This is not a novel for anyone very sensitive or sad. It will bring you down. Aside from that, the writing is quite beautiful. It carries this story in a simple, sincere, and heartfelt way.

The story is of a young woman named Piper who is dying of cancer. She reflects back on her years of childhood, growing up in a poverty-stricken part of rural Vermont. Left with only her father and brother after her mother deserts her family, Piper tries to become more accepted at school by taking part in a school play. Her teacher, Nick Hammer, singles out Piper due to her beautiful voice. As their relationship becomes more complicated, Piper's father leaves home to live with a woman who has a son in her class.

You see where this is show more going. Difficulties and pain as a child eventually turn into difficulties and pain as a young adult. Why was this book so good to read then? I think it was because I felt for Piper as she tried to survive all of the difficulties in her life. She had an amazing friend named Becca who was there for her both in childhood and in her equally difficult days as a grown woman. She had a brother Quinn who took on the role of a parent in order to keep some semblance of steadiness in Piper's life.

This is a story about an individual wanting comfort and nurturing and just not quite knowing how to go about getting it. It's a story of a devoted friend and a brother as well as a story about surviving adversity. It's also definitely worth a read. show less

Piper Kincaid, the narrator in T. Greenwood’s Undressing the Moon, is a thirty-year-old woman dying of cancer. The book moves between her present illness and memories of the past - the year she turned fourteen and her world turned upside down. Set in rural Vermont, the story gives us floating glimpses into Piper’s family life: her protective older brother, her underemployed, difficult father, and her mother, an artist who creates exquisite stained glass windows out of shards of broken glass. In this coming of age story, Piper’s mother and father both leave her when she is a young teen. She longs for comfort and stability in her life. Piper stumbles through bullying at school and turns to sex with an older man to replace her many show more losses. As an adult, Piper tries to make sense of those years, and to ease her conscience of the burdens of her own deceit.

The story unfolds in lyrical vignettes; the metaphor of broken shards of colored glass is often used to symbolize Piper’s life.

“My mother taught me how to find grace in wreckage. She taught me not how to reassemble, but how to rearrange. The stained-glass pictures she made were certain evidence that things can be broken and put back together, and that the mended thing will be more beautiful than the original. That true beauty is in the cracks, in the places where the pieces have once been shattered and then mended.”

There are discussion questions included at the end of the book. This is a book that would surely lend itself to book club discussions. show less

beautiful. sad. lonely little girl who was left by many and then built walls around her to not get her feelings hurt. But at the end she realizes who is her truest friend. Eventhough there is no action and the story floews like a small river, it is haunting and it stays with you.

Piper's mom leaves the family when she is 14, and her life unravels. Now looking back as a sick late-twenties woman, she tries to figure out how she feels about the past. This book is beautifully, wonderfully written - I read it all day by the fire until I was done. It's incredibly sad, though -- it will touch deeply anyone who has been left or broken. Not a very happy read, but a highly satisfying one.

I don't normally read books in which a character is dying of a disease. I put that aside in this novel as the other stories that were being told were most intriguing. It touches upon many interesting and controversial subjects including rape and abandonment. I find mother-daughter relationships most interesting to read because they can be most trying. Our childhoods are affected so deeply by our mother-daughter relationships, our very beings are formed by these relationships. I loved this part of the novel. This would be a great read for book groups as there are a vast number of topics that can be discussed. I skimmed the parts about Piper's illness and cut to the other parts of the story and those parts were most definately worth show more reading. I own the Hungry Season by T. Greenwood and am looking forward to reading her take on this family crisis. show less

At age thirty Piper Kincaid is dying of breast cancer. This is the end of what has hardly been an easy life. When Piper was a teenager her artist mother ran away, her spirit crushed by the burdens of poverty and motherhood. I expected that this would be a book about coming to terms with death, but it is actually a book about coming to terms with the loss of a mother. The year that Piper's mother left Piper finds herself drawn into a relationship with one of her male teachers. Piper's brother is committed to putting a stop to what is decidedly an inappropriate relationship, though Piper clings to it, feeling that she has lost so much else.

I found this book to be rather difficult to get through, and I expected to like it more than I did. show more The subject matter sounded like something that would appeal to me, but the execution didn't match my expectations. I simply could not get invested in the characters and their web of decidedly vast problems. show less