Karen Ball's Reviews > Beneath a Meth Moon

Teaching middle school, I'm always a little edgy about ordering substance abuse related fiction. This one was a stellar purchase, though. Laurel has lost her beloved mother and grandmother who were killed during Hurricane Katrina because her grandmother refused to leave her coastal Mississippi home. Laurel's father moves the family to central Iowa, where they try to pick up the pieces. Starting a new high school is stressful enough, but Laurel seems to find a place with the cheerleading squad, her new friend Kaylee, and her basketball star boyfriend T-Boom. T-Boom introduces her to the moon... crystal meth. He cooks it and sells it out of an abandoned house, and once he gives Laurel a taste of the moon, she's hooked. It's not just the incredible good feeling she got the first time -- when all her sadness seemed to float away and suddenly the world seemed full of possibility. It's the itching, creepy crawling sensations she gets when it wears off... and if she could just have a little more, it would all go away. As her life spirals downward, the cravings for meth replace everything for Laurel, including her father and her four-year-old brother. She is reduced to a homeless beggar, living in the dark unheated back room of an abandoned hardware store in the next town. When she meets Moses, she is at the point where she can't bear to even look at her reflection in windows... she has that filthy, emaciated, malnourished meth user look to her. Moses sees a spark of something in her, though, and as he paints memorials to other young people who died from meth use, he gently encourages Laurel to see that she's not completely lost yet. Powerful writing that shows the curse of this particular drug epidemic realistically, but also hopefully. Absolutely amazing.