Graffiti Moon

Cath Crowley

I think it was two (or was it three?) years ago when Graffiti Moon was enthusiastically recommended on almost every YA book blog I read. It’s been on my mental “one day” list for a long time, but I never actually got around to buying myself a copy (I think it was a combination of wanting a paperback edition and preferring the Australian cover to the American one). Finally, I had my chance to read it through Holly of The Book Harbinger. Thanks Secret Santa!
 
The Premise: (from the back blurb) “Senior year is over, and Lucy has the perfect way to celebrate: tonight she’s going to find Shadow, the mysterious graffiti artist whose work appears all over the city. Somewhere in the glassy darkness, he’s out there, spraying color, spraying birds and blue sky on the night. And Lucy knows that a guy who paints like Shadow is someone she could fall for — really fall for.
 
The last person Lucy wants to spend this night with is Ed, the guy she’s managed to avoid since punching him in the nose on the most awkward date of her life. But when Ed tells Lucy he knows where to find Shadow, the two of them are suddenly on all all-night search to places where Shadow’s pieces of heartbreak and escape echo off the city walls. And what Lucy can’t see is the one thing that’s right before her eyes.”
 
My Thoughts: This is a story told from mostly two points of view: that of Lucy, celebrating the end of year twelve with her friends Jazz and Daisy, and that of Ed, a high school dropout who has a few hours to kill before he and his friends Leo and Dylan plan to break into the school. Ed and Lucy know each other, but between them lies a gulf filled with awkwardness. They had one date that ended in humiliation, and neither of them have quite gotten over it. For Lucy, it cemented her belief that outside of books (and the possible exception of her obsession, Shadow), looking for a kindred spirit amongst the local boys only leads to disappointment.  For Ed, their date was yet another demoralizing event in a long string of demoralizing events.
 
It’s not really anyone’s fault. Lucy doesn’t know a lot of things about Ed because he never confided in her. And Ed is so used to hiding the truth that it’s led to a spectacular failure of a date and his dropping out of school. It doesn’t help that Ed and his mom were barely scraping by before he lost his job. Now he’s worried about the rent and making decisions out of desperation rather than good judgement. That brings them to where they are now: Lucy and her friends with nothing more pressing on their minds than a night of fun and possibility, Ed and his friends going along, but keeping their secrets.
 
What follows is a read that hit the sweet spot: not too short, but not overly long; sweet but not fluffy; predictable in a comforting way, but also utterly different from anything else I’ve read. And just the right amount of humor to keep everything going. I couldn’t help liking Lucy and Ed immediately. Lucy with her instant friendships and her take-no-nonsense edge, and Ed, who is a little bit lost and deserves a break. Most of this book was just Ed and Lucy talking, and their banter is pretty great, but also reading what each is thinking about the other as we switch back and forth between them makes their interactions even better. Ed’s unease with hiding things from Lucy makes for some parts particularly poignant.
 
The book that Graffiti Moon is probably most compared to is Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Music is to Nick and Norah, as Art is to Graffiti Moon. When the shared interest in creativity comes with a night-long adventure on the town, bumping into ex-girlfriends, and skirting from trouble, it’s no wonder that the two books are considered similar. But the similarities are superficial. These stories hit me in different ways. I feel like Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist has a young adult world that’s separate from authority figures and responsibility; it exists within an intimate sphere and is about the magic that happens when people develop a  connection. In Graffiti Moon, that frisson is there too, it’s just that here the characters aren’t so separate from their day-to-day lives. This is particularly true for Ed, who is constantly struggling to just get through life because he worrying about money and helping his single-parent mother who’s making her way through nursing school. Ed’s mind is always in quiet turmoil, and there’s this tension in watching someone who knows better start to take the wrong turn.
 
I think that what really got me with this book was how being a dreamer and using creative expression was portrayed so positively, beyond just being the common denominator between Ed and Lucy. My sister is the artist in the family, and I can tell you that going to the MoMA with her is a whole different experience than going with non-artist friends. Because of this, I just loved reading Lucy geeking out over art. And I loved that art could change Ed’s life in a real, not just metaphorical way, if only Ed would let it. I also loved that Ed and Lucy have parents and mentors who encourage them instead of dissuading them. It was nice to read the interactions between Ed and Lucy and those adults. I loved all these things because every time either Ed or Lucy think about something that inspires them, their words became particularly poetic. It made me root for them to keep this.
 
Overall: Really good. I think this one will have wide appeal — its writing is unassuming and accessible, but if you want depth you’ll find it. Also this is one of those books that pleasantly lingers. It could be because of the beautiful artwork painted with words, or because certain things here make you ruminate afterward. I found myself thinking about how Graffiti Moon was about the juxtaposition between imagination and reality and when I saw that theme I couldn’t stop thinking of examples: in the way Lucy and Ed’s lives became the basis for their art, in Lucy’s expectations of Shadow versus the truth as Ed knew it, and in the way art affected both their lives. It was nice to think about art and life for a little while.
 
Buy: Amazon | Powell’s | The Book Depository
 
Other reviews:
Inkcrush – 5 stars (“Somehow this book perfectly captures how I felt as a teen – that big dreaming scheming place in my head”)
need_tea – B+/A- (“My initial reaction was perhaps a bit tepid, liked it but it wasn’t that great, but over time I thought about it some more and my opinion of it rose”)
Bookchilla – 4/5 (“Lucy & Ed’s story unfolded very nicely and wrapped up in such a feel good way”)
Bunbury in the Stacks –  (“My experience with Graffiti Mooncould be summed up using a number of variations of the sentence: “I don’t like _________, but I liked it in this book.””)
Angieville – (“GRAFFITI MOON is a gem–a breath of fresh air.”)