This story told in verse made me cry my eyes out! Woah.

Frankie dreams of being an astronomer. She bonds over space with her best friend Harriet, who takes pictures through the telescope. She is in the process of applying to an internship at the planetarium, along with Harriet.

Harriet gets in trouble at school for sending a pic of herself to her Physics teacher and the girls fall out. Soon after, Frankie has her first sexual experience with a boy called Benjamin and gets her period during it.

People at school find out about it. Frankie is bullied in school and online as memes are made. Nobody stands up for her. Period shaming is real and horrific and I was honestly so devastated reading what was happening to Frankie. It's just biology.

Periods should not be a cause for disgust. The teens in this book were just awful. But friendship finds its way and I'm glad Frankie's parents were supportive of her and helped her. But my heart hurts for this girl.

The ending is very empowering and I loved it to bits. I cried. So good.

Thanks to Candlewick Press for providing a digital ARC of Blood Moon in exchange for an honest review.

You know that saying "if you can't say it, you sing it. If you can't sing it, you dance it"? Free verse, to me, has always been singing (poems are dance numbers if you're mad I didn't complete the metaphor).

The problem with Blood Moon is that the majority of it felt say-able. While the message was wonderfully executed and important and there were certainly a few lines aided by the free verse style, I genuinely think this book would have functioned better if it wasn't free verse. This is a narrative based story forced into a mold that doesn't fit it. Free verse is supposed to be freeing (its literally in the name) but Blood Moon (especially its first act) felt like it was trying to hard to match this idea of what free verse should look like. The story is still good and I wish this was mixed medium instead so we'd get a traditional structure for the narrative bits and symbolic spacing for ends of chapters and phrases that need emphasizing.

A good story, but the execution of it felt too off.

I think that stories like this are important for young readers. I do think that some of the contents of this book felt a little awkward or cliche, but overall the use of verse made this a bit easier to digest and might make this more engaging for readers to experience. The verse itself was mostly well written and kept my attention.