cover image Moonglow

Moonglow

Michael Griffo. Kensington/KTeen, $9.95 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-0-7582-8072-5

Dominy Robineau, 16, wakes up next to her best friend’s corpse, blood under her own fingernails, remembering a full Nebraska moon overhead. Responsibility appears inescapable, but Dominy can’t piece together what happened. She’s been angry at Jess for a long time without understanding why, and at crucial moments her memory goes cloudy and strange. Dominy’s life as a high school princess has been heading downhill for a while, and her father’s unusual behavior isn’t helping. Moonlight both soothes and terrifies Dominy, and that puzzles her, too. The story unfolds slowly in set pieces of dialogue and character analysis, situating Dominy in an odd context, replete with a gay albino wide receiver, an exotic French mother in a coma, and unexpected outbreaks of “guh-ross” body hair. This is horror, not humor, but the line Griffo (the Archangel Academy series) treads is occasionally very fine. Where it ends is unclear: although Dominy figures out what is wrong, there is still no solution in sight as this first book in the Darkborn Legacy series draws to a close. Ages 14–up. Agent: Evan Marshall, the Evan Marshall Agency. (Mar.)