Midnight Without a Moon is one of the books I bought from BookXcess and I am so glad I did because I could not stop reading this.

The book is centered around Rose Lee, an African-American girl living in Mississippi in 1955. Although Rose is smart and ambitious, her grandmother openly favours her lighter-skin cousin, Queen, and her mother has abandoned her brother and her to move up North with her new husband and family. But things cannot continue on the way they always were, with more and more African-Americans are murdered for things like registering to vote and, in the case of Emmett Till, allegedly whistling at a white woman.

As a non-American, I am not very familiar with American history. The only background knowledge I have comes from what learnt about segregation and the Jim Crow eras during literature class many many years ago (while we were studying To Kill a Mockingbird). Because of this, the vivid picture painted by the book of two unequal classes was shocking, and helped me understand why America’s racial history continues to influence the present day.

One thing I appreciated was the variety of characters in the book. Rose, quite naturally, chafes at the unfair treatment, and her aunt is the same. But her grandma, Ma Pearl and her grandpa, Papa, are against changing the status quo (Ma Pearl more than Papa). It’s not just internalised racism, the book shows that they are also making a pragmatic choice – by choosing not to rock the boat, they are able to keep the relatively comfortable situation they have. While I disagreed with Ma Pearl’s views, I understood where they were coming from and I appreciated their inclusion in the book.

Since the book is more about Rose’s internal growth, the plot itself is anchored by the passing of time rather than by anything Rose does. Personally, I think this works because there is so much happening around Rose that her journey to understand what’s going on and form her own conclusions was enough for me. I hope that, if there is a book two, she would start actively taking part in the civil rights movement, but she’s only thirteen in this book.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book. It taught me a lot about how life was really like in the mid-1950s (only seventy years ago!) and how willing people are to turn to violence just to preserve an oppressive status quo (hmmm sounds familiar). The subject matter here is definitely not easy, but racism is something that we need to face head on if we are to solve it.

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