The Lovely Bones meets Ghost, Remember The Moon is a poignant story of an everlasting love that reaches far beyond the grave. Jay is a successful businessman, husband, and father. His sudden death leaves his wife, Maya, hollow and angry, and their seven-year-old son, Calder, spins destructively out of control. With help from a spirited afterlife therapist, Jay revisits his past, discovering hard truths about himself and the world he left behind. He attempts to comfort Maya and Calder in their grief while discovering his true “spirit” self. Then, when Maya hires a psychic to communicate with him, Jay learns her darkest secret and in his shock, inadvertently sends her on a path of ill-fated romance. Confronted with the decision to either follow his mortal instincts or help his wife find love, Jay must learn to transcend everything he ever was.
The blurb had me intrigued from the first sentence so I one-clicked and sat down to read, I finished it in an evening. I literally could not put it down. This book was a beautiful read, a journey through the story of grief and loss in both human and spirit. I loved how the author managed to weave the two stories together so beautifully, how human became intermixed with spirit and vice-versa.
I guess I’m like a lot of people, curious about any potential ‘afterlife’. It’s natural as a human to wonder if there’s anything for us after death, or before birth, natural to hope that our loved ones have gone somewhere and natural to hope that they could be watching over us, so close but unseen. The premise of this book exploring an idea of what could possibly be out there definitely appealed to my sense of curiosity. The ideas this author used to create this ‘afterworld’ were beautiful and sometimes unexpected, but always made sense for the story and characters. I have to say, if there is indeed something out there for us after death I wouldn’t mind at all if what was in this book was our reality.
Watching myself die, I felt no pain, no emotion, no fear.
As for the human aspect of the story, it was beautiful and heart wrenching at the same time. Calder (the son) had my heart breaking again and again. Following both Maya and Calder through all of the hurt, pain, loneliness and anger. All of the attempts at moving forward, of adapting to the new reality of mother and son only, of learning to live with the fact that life is changed and to some extent will always be different, the fact that you can never go back to how it used to be. It was written as it should be, all encompassing. Like a giant blanket of fog had been pulled over this family and they were trying to work their way through it. I can’t ever imagine what the reality of losing your husband/parent would be like, but I am sure that this story does a very good job at creating the reality of such a horrible loss.
Death taught me that luck or unluck is merely an illusion of the human mind, a story we tell ourselves so we can blame our failures on bad luck rather than face our messy, true selves.
This isn’t my go-to genre but this is up there with some of my favorites from when I do read it from time to time. It was so heartfelt and poignant and it completely captured me. It’s definitely a must-read, a very worthwhile story that was very deserving of being told.
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