Review #372
‘Hang the Moon’ by Jeannette Walls for a 3.5/5 stars for me. This historical fiction lacked plot and intrigue for me.
It starts with a prologue of when Sallie is 8 years old and almost accidentally gets her younger brother killed when they’re playing on a racing wagon. Sallie wants to be the fastest girl in the world but her father sends her away after this accident to live with her aunt which is where chapter 1 begins.
Years later when Sallie is 18 she’s called back home for her stepmothers funeral. Her little brother is now 13 and her father barely recognized her. Her life from the past feels both familiar and dreamlike as if it never happened.
Sallie’s father manipulated others in town with his power and wants to marry her off soon (big surprise…) Sallie fights against his idea , especially after her own mother’s marriage didn’t work out. There are hints that Sallie’s father (accidentally?) murdered her mother during an argument when Sallie was a young child but there are no details yet.
Sallie is about to set off with her own goals but hopefully they be once clear soon because the pacing is a little slow and I need more to grab onto. Maybe Tom needs to be showing up more often.
Okie dokie so I read everything until page 100 then started skimming because it hadn’t felt like the story started yet. I skimmed the rest and felt like I got enough info to learn that just about basically everyone dies in different ways. It’s not the story I expected from the cover and prologue. I assumed it’d be about the first women mechanic or the first women race car driver or something. Instead it’s just family drama and how the majority of men are terrible (the usual theme). A few twists happened at the end but I wasn’t invested in the characters since I had skimmed their prior interactions.
what I got out of this is Sallie tested the rules of who’s an outsider and who belongs. Of who was legitimately an heir and who should’ve been serving who. Sallie tried to challenge the status quo in her time and her story is one of many in this time period who push for progression in our culture and fight against what’s wrong