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.