4.5 stars ( )

Mmmm.....

I think that's the only real reaction I can get from this book.

The mothers stand by unable to move while one of their daughters has the courage to save the drowning blue girl. No one knows who the blue girl is nor where she comes from but she has a propensity for drowning, and the mothers have secretly been visiting her home to feed her moon pies made from their secrets. As the mothers' secrets become more plentiful, the blue girl becomes more gluttonous for the sticky marshmallow cream filling, and the daughters start to find suspicion in their mothers' behavior.

It's a book full of magical realism about these three mothers and how they came to live along this lake, a lake that attracted them like it attracts the summer tourists, but for some reason when fall comes, the tourists leave while they stay behind.

A story about the common doubts and regrets that comes from living in a small town I was intrigued by the premise but felt the writing to be juvenile, restrained, and even afraid. It didn't help that the story shifted perspective between the three mothers and their three daughters which served as a handicap so that the author wouldn't actually have to develop the relationships and setting more deeply.

As someone else mentioned in another thread, I'm finding a lot of these contemporary reads rely too heavily on this shifting perspectives trope and it mostly hurts, rather than aids their story. Also, was this story to be YA? With the writing level it felt YA, but the topic would have been stronger had it been a purely adult book but having both the point of view of both the daughters and the mothers scrambled the feel.

While some reviewers talk about the "haunting scenery" and find the book "compelling", I know I'll forget I ever read this book. ( )

‘’And so, on Tuesday nights, I wrap the moon pies in aluminum foil and I tell myself that I will be able to save my daughter - that I will be able to save all of us - once all the secrets has been eaten, digested, and somehow done away with.’’

An unnamed lake town that comes alive during the summer. The visiting tourists spend their quite, picturesque holidays and leave when summer ends, unaware of the secrets that haunt the small community. Unaware of the strange blue girl that eats moon pies filled with cream and lies. Unaware of the mothers who pour their faults and darkest secrets in the sweets, suffocating the Blue Girl, dragging her down in their mud. Unaware of the daughters’ struggle to make amends for their mothers’ mistakes. Unaware of the fathers who ignore everything and everyone.

The moon pies contain secrets too terrible to share. Secrets born out of regrets and wrongdoings, of stalled lives and unfulfilled wishes. Laurie Foos creates a contemporary tale using symbolism and psychology in a powerful, haunting scenery. The moon associated with womanhood and passion. The sweets, so deceptive in their nature, so tempting and harmful. The colour blue, a shade of guilt, melancholy and mystery. The thoughts of mothers and daughters conveyed through the haze, interrupting the silence of the girl who has no voice of her own. She still retains her own free will, though. The question is what will she choose to do with it?

Based on the medieval tradition of the Sin Eater, the villager who would accept the sins of the dying person and prepare the route away from Hell, Foos writes a beautiful, shocking novel about motherhood, family relationships and the need for understanding between the younger generation and their parents. A book impossible to review. You have to read it and experience it deeply…

‘’It’s as if she lights up somehow, like a house you pass at night when the shades are drawn. You start to imagine what the people inside are like, whether they’re watching sitcoms or waiting to kill each other, and you see that flash against the blinds coming from the TV screen. That’s what she is, I think, a Technicolor blue that lights and flashes when no one is looking.’’

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The mothers should have jumped as soon as they saw the blue girl floating in the small town’s lake. But it was Audrey, the quiet daughter, who went after her first. In the weeks following the accident, the blue girl sits alone and silent in her room, willing and able to eat secrets the mothers bake into moon pies made to help them feel some degree of control in their increasingly unpredictable worlds.

It’s no wonder that small towns, distant teenagers, and family secrets pepper the plot lines of so many novels, as fiction parallels so many of our lives. But it can also be hard to make these stories distinct. Foos strikes a brilliant balance in acknowledging common similarities while also infusing her novel with overarching themes and big questions, all wrapped up in her fantastical blue girl.

“I remember lying on the beach that afternoon, looking at Audrey while trying at the same time not to look because I knew if she caught me she’d turn away. I remember wondering if I had been that way with my own mother once, always distant, always trying to disappear, always dismissing her, she who had held me in her womb and squeezed me out. How ungrateful we all once were, we daughters who become mothers only to learn how it feels, the endless cycle of rejection. I remember thinking about my mother that day, wishing I could tell her how sorry I was.”

The Blue Girl is told from the alternating perspectives of six narrators—three mothers and their daughters. Rather than feeling tangled, as the technique sometimes can, the different perspectives give us varied insight into the blue girl and the secrets she’s fed: a husband post-breakdown, a fragile son trapped in the mind of a child, and children sneaking off in the night. Though the oddity of baking secrets into moon pies may seem outlandish on the surface, it’s an incredibly compelling and compassionate vessel for a concept painfully familiar to many of us.

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