Maggot Moon, by Sally Gardner. Illustrated by Julian Crouch.

[rachelmanija]

On the other side of the wall
there is a dark secret.
And the devil.
And the moon man.

I bought this book at a used bookshop, intrigued by the weird title and cover, the enigmatic blurb, and these really neat flip-book style interior illustrations of a rat scurrying from page to page. I thought it was a spooky children's book a la Coraline.

HahahahahahahaOMFG was I wrong. I may have never been more wrong.

I expected The Graveyard Book, and I got The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

This book won the Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, and I can see why. The prose style is distinctive and the story has a pageturner quality; I read it in one sitting. It's also extremely well-designed. The illustrations aren't just good, they're very cleverly placed and the whole visual/reading package is extremely well-done.

Okay now I'm done being positive.

The other reason it won the Printz is that it's about Very Important Topics. It's about either an alternate history in which the Nazis won WWII and took over England, or an alternate history in which Russia took over England, or a historical fantasy in which some unnamed country which strongly resembles both Nazi Germany and postwar Russia took over England. Whichever it is, it's aiming for allegory rather than naturalism.

The main character, Standish Treadwell, is dyslexic. (So is the author). He can barely read and his narrative voice is very quirky/poetic. He attends school in Zone Seven, which is where you go if you're not in quite deep enough shit to be sent to a concentration camp YET. However, people disappear on the regular. His parents have disappeared before the book begins, and it starts after his best friend Hector has also disappeared.

It's 1956 and the Motherland is preparing to send a rocket to the moon. There's a giant wall and a mysterious giant building which always has electricity, which everyone is forbidden to go near. If you think you know where this is going, yep! You're totally right.

There is a lot of extremely graphic violence. A teacher beats a boy to death in front of the entire class, in explicit detail, then gets shot in front of Standish. It turns out that Standish's mother had her tongue cut out, again in pretty graphic terms. And while we learn all these increasingly horrible details of what's going on, and the story hurtles toward what is clearly going to be a deeply depressing conclusion, we have the art.

Every couple pages, there's an illustration of a fly or a rat. They appear in different places, moving across the page and doing things in sequence, so it's almost a flip-book but not quite as there's too many pages in between the illustrations to work that way. At first it's really cute, with the fly flying across the pages and the rat going in and out of a tunnel. Those are the ones I saw when I opened the book in the bookstore, as I only open books to early sections so I don't spoil myself. Later in the book...



The rat gets poisoned and dies, and then the fly descends to lay eggs IN ITS MOUTH, and the subsequent time-lapse illustrations were so unbelievably gross that I ended up reading with my hand blocking them.

There's a lot of mentions of maggots and killing rats and so forth in the book, though the exact story taking place in the illustrations doesn't happen in it. I think they're an allegory of how Nazis corrupt society like maggots making a dead rat's belly swell and take over like maggots erupting from a rotting rat corpse. Which is something I DID NOT NEED TO SEE. Over multiple pages, too!

Standish learns that the moon landing is a fake to cow other countries into thinking the Motherland can destroy them with space missiles. Hector and his family were taken because Hector's father is an engineer who can help fake it convincingly. While he was there, he helped one of the astronauts escape. He was an actual astronaut who thought it was going to be a real mission. He conveys this in writing because his tongue was cut off.

Standish goes into the camp in the hope that if he can work on the set, he can reveal the hoax live on TV as it's transmitted worldwide. There he finds that Hector's mother was shot immediately upon arrival. Hector had two fingers hacked off and slowly dies of sepsis in Standish's arms. Standish does reveal the hoax but he and Hector's father are immediately shot to death.

While Hector is dying, he confesses his love to Standish and they kiss. I feel like this would have worked better if we'd known the boys were in love at any point before literal seconds before one of them dies, because as it is it feels like some YA Jacobean drama:

Hector: I love you. The crazy, brave muddle that is you.

(Dies)

If you're thinking that's not how fifteen-year-old boys talk, even when dying (honestly probably especially while dying) remember how I mentioned the book wasn't going for naturalism? For me that worked a lot better in narration than in actual dialogue. But because of this, the characters felt more like literary devices than people, so I didn't feel any actual emotions when they died horribly.

So by the end of the book, the only characters who aren't dead are Standish's beloved grandpa, his teacher girlfriend, and the moon man astronaut he's sheltering, but it seems a foregone conclusion that the Nazis will find and kill them in very short order. But Standish revealed the hoax (probably - that part is pretty hallucinatory) so triumph of the human spirit I guess.



I'm a bit puzzled as to who the audience for this book actually is. The Printz Award is for YA. The Carnegie Medal lists it as for ages 11+. It's way too graphically violent for younger kids and the illustrations are pure nightmare fuel, but other than that it reads more like a children's book than YA, both in terms of prose and due to self-consciously cute stuff like Hector and Standish's imaginary planet Juniper and their imaginary ice cream-colored car. I had to keep reminding myself that they were fifteen because they came across more like ten or eleven-year-olds.

Possibly the true audience is adults on book award committees.

This is a book that does what it intends to do, kept me engrossed, and has literary merit, but I didn't like it. Also, fuck those horrific drawings. I wish I'd never seen them.