Heather Zydek

Stranger Moon Heather Zydek

When 12-year-old Gaia finds a pale green Luna moth wing pressed between the pages of an old insect guide in her basement, she becomes obsessed with giant silk moths. Gaia is just like the insects she adores ? she's shoed away by her workaholic father and crushed by bullies at school. She finds comfort in nature and makes it her goal to track down the mysterious night creature in the fleeting one-week window of the adult Luna's life. But the night Gaia and her neighborhood friends go on a moth hunt, they stumble upon something much stranger hiding in the woods: a bug-eating, ghastly-looking wildwoman living in an abandoned ice cream truck. In Stranger Moon, Gaia and her friends spend their summer vacation spying on the strange woman while warding off attacks from two bullies nick-named "The Emmas" and searching for a glimpse of a Luna moth. When Gaia discovers the seeming madwoman's true identity and finds herself armed with information that can ruin her worst enemy, she and her friends must decide whether or not to seek revenge. "'Stranger Moon' is hard to stop reading once the first page is turned. It?s a book about friendship, curiosity and courage that also explores such major issues as loss of a parent, an attraction to the beauty and mystery of nature, the cruelty of fellow students, and the basic strangeness of the world - and often the people - around us." JIM FOREST, author of "All Is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day"