Customer Reviews

Finding Moon

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I forced myself to read this book after I had exhausted the supply of Hillerman's Navajo mysteries. I was completely caught up in Moon Matthias' search for his niece and for himself. Mr. Hillerman subtly blended suspense with his usual attention to characters' integrity and his obvious respect for varied religious traditions. I was very satisfied with this story.

Tony Hillerman has definitely given us his best change-up pitch with Finding Moon. We are not on the reservation. In fact, we travel back in time to the Vietnamese war as one simple man attempts to carry out his Mother's search for the missing niece of her dead, other son.

The story recounts twenty-seven days, with a few skipped. Each one leads off with a quote from the news of the time about Vietnam. The story ends on May 2, 1975. The last press quote begins: "Saigon, South Vietnam, April 29 (UPI)- A helicopter shuttle service began evacuating Americans from the roof of the U.S. Embassy today while marine guards kept thousands of desperate Vietnamese from breaking through the gates."

Moon has to meet many tough challenges, learn a lot about what he is really made of, and completes the hero's journey in fine fashion. You can see that there is also an element of the Phoenix rising from the ashes, as Moon seeks to preserve life at a time when life is very precarious as the South Vietnamese government falls.

You will seldom find an adventure-based mystery that is as rich in characterization and heart-warming plot as this one.

There are a lot of asides in the book about the Vietnam war, bureaucratic stalls in particular, and the nature of families that are worth the trip with Moon, as well.

It may take you a few pages to get over looking for the Navajo reservation in this novel, but soon you'll never miss it. You'll have an irresistible experience in the process!

I just started reading Tony Hillerman and was really enjoying his Indian characters. When I saw a different venue it was exciting, and I couldn't wait to read it.
Well, it was interesting but not up to what I was used to from this author. The Story was good but not deep enough, you are always waitng for something to happen. No excitment. Moon was a boring character and could have been written with a little more depth.
Please stick with the characters you work with best.

All you need to know is that it is an adventure, not a mystery. The rest is Hillerman's typical brilliant story telling. In fact in this novel Hillerman goes beyond the usual because he weaves in historic events that are usually forgotten about in today's media (ie the real ending of the Vietnam War).

I fell in love with Hillerman because of his Chee/Leaphorn novels but I now count Finding Moon as one of Hillerman's best. The plot is interesting, it is well written and evocative, but the best aspect of this novel is the fact that a plain, ordinary man, discovers the extraoridanary individual inside of himself. This book is haunting, uplifting, and powerful.

Hillerman seems to have had a deep need to write Finding Moon--the same way he seems to have HAD to write such books as Dancehall of the Dead or The Dark Wind.
And yet its neither a mystery, nor set in the Southwest, and there's not a Navajo in sight. But Hillerman seems to have dedicated it to several fellow soldiers, and says he's used some of them in the book. I think there's a story there, that he's telling somehow in the book--an utterly private story those friends can read and that the rest of us can only guess.

There's that great Hillerman ability to describe action in the outdoors (remember how Fly on the Wall came alive in the stalking sequences, outdoors?) And both major and minor characters go through changes and development.

How can something so different in setting, character, and plot be so much the same in the feeling it gives you? Because when Hillerman's got the passion, his superb craftsmanship lets it shine through.

Moon Mathias's younger brother died in South Vietnam in a helicopter crash. It seemed that his brother Ricky had a daughter. Arrangements were made to send the child from Vietnam to the Philippines. Moon's mother has traveled from Florida to California enroute to the Philippines when she has a heart attack at the airport. Moon is a journalist, the managing editor of a newspaper in Colorado, and as Ricky's only sibling he is called upon to journey in his mother's stead to the Far East.

Arriving in Manila Moon learns that the child has not arrived and that things are heating up in Vietnam and Cambodia. In his meeting with the lawyer little is gained. In Manila a woman with a Dutch name finds him. She seeks him out under the impression that he plans to take over his brother's business and would be in a position to help her find her brother, a Lutheran missionary. Eventually Moon, the woman, and a Chinese man seeking the ashes of an ancestor travel to the vicinity of the child's mother's village and amazingly find the child and learn in convincing fashion of the death of the brother. Moon then decides to travel with the child to the United States and to return to Manila in order to be with the woman and to run his brother's business.

What has been created in this excellent work is a sort of coming of age story of a middle-aged person. The past has been put to rest and the future beckons. The adventure aspects of the tale are very exciting.

There are interviews with author Tony Hillerman which indicate that, as a writer, he may have felt a little trapped on the Navajo Reservation. He was certainly grateful for the success of the Leaphorn / Chee books, not the least because those books serve a cultural education role, both on and off the Reservation. But his interests ranged wider than Navajo country he loved and described so well.

By the way, I love those books. Like the Arthur Upton books that Hillerman read growing up in Oklahoma, both the dramatic landscape and the people who live therein are essential characters in the Leaphorn / Chee books. Plotting, characterization, and wry good humor are also strengths of those books.

In Finding Moon, Hillerman leverages his success to force his way off the reservation. I'm glad he did. In fact, as I read this book the first time, I found myself irritated that Hillerman offers his "apologies for wandering away from our beloved Navajo canyon country." There is nothing in this book for which he needed to apologize.

One of the unenthusiastic reviews of the book here on Amazon calls the character Malcolm 'Moon' Mathias "boring". A couple of others lament the "lack of action". I respect these opinions, but do not understand them. Admittedly, a lot of what I like about this book is the interior action. Walking with Moon Mathias is interesting, and even deeply moving at times. He is plunged into an overwhelming set of circumstances that forces him to learn who he really is and ultimately to embrace that reality. So, for example, I don't mind at all the long walks he takes and the long talks he has with a Filipino priest. These are essential to the drama, and I would argue ARE the drama, and are good drama.

But there is plenty of the other kind of action in this book as well, enough to satisfy my own love of action. I remember vividly following newspaper and radio reports about the fall of Saigon and the atrocities of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. The chaos and horror of that time were imprinted on me, and so perhaps I am an easy target for an author who uses that chaos and horror as the environment for the story of a daring rescue.

Read this book with an open mind and heart. I believe the protagonist's character development could be contagious for such a reader.

A word about the Kindle edition: I just read this book for the 4th time, but the 1st time on Kindle. The 5 stars are for the book. The Kindle edition is a 1 star production. The publisher should be embarrassed to have its name on this edition, especially at $7.95. It looks like the raw OCR results, completely unedited. In places, the misspellings and misplaced punctuation are so plentiful they are downright annoying. Is it unreasonable to expect that if we pay the same price for a Kindle edition as we do for an edited paperback we should get the same edited quality as the paperback?

I am an avid fan of Hillerman's Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn novels. This time I decided to read something that was not Hillerman's usuual genre: now I'm totally hooked on anything Hillerman writes! His craft in storytelling is phenominal! I will certainly purchase more of his novels.

I do like Tony Hillerman and I was initially quite surprised by Finding Moon because it is set in so different a world from the Jim Chee/Joe Leaphorn stories. Hillerman's Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam era is evocative and detailed--just as one feels that one has entered Indian Country, one feel that one has landed, like Moon Mathias, in a completely disorienting new place here.

Moon Mathias is a character who grows up in the course of this novel. It is a wonderful, unusual coming of age novel, with a characters who doesn't trust his own resourcefulness or ability to commit to situations or people. I was very impressed, Unlike Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, who have strong internal value systems tht help them to make decisions, Moon Mathias has not been forced to think through what he really believes, and this story takes hima long way on that journey of self-discovery.