Customer Reviews

Keeping The Moon (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

5 star:		(99)
4 star:		(68)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Coli (short for Nicole) has a famous mother, who showed women around the country that they can be determined to get fit. Now Colie has lost weight just like her mother, but she still doesn't seem to fit in with other people. Now her mother is touring in Europe, and Colie has to stay in North Carolina with her Aunt Mira.

Then, out of the blue, she ends up with a job at the "Last Chance Bar and Grill". Colie still lacks confidence, especially after running into some classmates who still tease her and spread hurtful rumors. But with the help of fellow waitresses Isabel and Morgan, she finds a part of her she can really love and appreciate. She has true friends here, not to mention a boy who she never expected to be with.

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:) This novel brought me lots of smiles. You know, it really did make me think twice about how well I appreciate myself. Girls today don't always have that great of an outlook on themselves, but this book has opened my eyes. I hope it can do the same for others as well.

I loved this book! I recommend this book to anyone who loves to read. Keeping the Moon really makes you think about life. I enjoyed reading about Colie and her fitness trainer mom,Kiki Sparks.I also like reading about her Aunt Mira and her new friends that she made. They are Isabel, Morgan, and Norman. The characters seem so real. I think that teeneagers especially would like it because it has to do with a teenage girl and her life at school, and with other people. This book tells you all the hard times that she went through and how she kept going even though she didn't think she could. I'm sure that most people can relate to this book in a certain way. I really liked this book and I'd definitely read it again!

I am also 15, the same as Colie, and I know this is a book that you could read over and over again and can never seem to put down. I like that it's witty and clever, too. What's funny is that it's called keeping the moon and the book I read right before it, Under the Baseball Moon, is also one of my favorite love stories of all time. I guess now I'm looking for one more "moon" book,, but I definitely recommend this one.

This book is about 15 year old Nicole Sparks who is forced to stay with her overly obese aunt while her mother,Kiki Sparks,is on a business trip.Shortly after hearing this news,she decides that her summer is ruined but, after an encounter with an artistic hippie,old bullies,a new crush,and two psychotic best friends...her summer just might might end with a bang!Through this heart-capturing novel Nicole's story shows that great friends can be found in strange places.

This book was so good,I never put it down!I will admit it is a bit crazy but ,thats what makes it so wonderful to read!You feel as though your your actually in Nicole's shoes through the whole story.Basically what I'm saying is if you like to read strange,funny,and dramatic stories.."Keeping the Moon" is perfect for you!

After I finished reading this book, I found I really didn't like it. The narrator is kind of boring and whiney. The secondary characters however, are a lot stronger than the main character. Isabel, the pretty waitress, is one of Sarah Dessen's best characters ever. She has great lines, a great personality, and is really well drawn. You could picture her character as a real person; she isn't cliched.
The story, especially for a Sarah Dessen novel, is extremely ordinary and obvious. It's been done ten thousand times over. I like Sarah Dessen's books because most of the time they have unusual storylines. This one is just the typical "former fat girl has low self-esteem but learns that loving who you are is true beauty" plot. It also had the typical "father and son don't get along because the son won't go into the family business" storyline with Norman. This book might still have had a chance to be saved if not for the extremely predictable ending where Colie realizes she's fallen for Norman.
The best part of this book is the "Chick Night". It has great descriptions and is really fun and believable (aside from the cheesy part where they dance around singing "I Will Survive").
Sarah Dessen became my favorite author because she didn't write typical young adult books like this one. She favors an unusual story and memorable characters, and writes great depictions. This book, however, while it has awesome description, is strongly lacking in the other areas.

Colie, was ready to escape from the "fat years", or life on the road, living off fast food, moving place to place, when her mom finally became famous for her motivational weight loss programs. When Colie finally settled in, her normal life was quite a joke, she was made fun of for first being fat, and then for being thin. Her lip ring and dyed hair showed people a look they wanted to stay away from. Soon enough, Colie's mother tours Europe for her program, leaving Colie to stay with her strange Aunt Mira in Colby, North Carolina. She is looking forward to a miserable summer, having no friends, she wasn't expecting to find any in Colby. Everything changes when Colie meets Isabell, and Morgan, who help her find her true idenity. This book is well written, and full of suprises that keep you interested. Its a wonderful book!

I read Keeping the Moon, by Sarah Dessen. The main character, Colie, is the daughter of Katharine Sparks. Or Kiki Sparks, when people started to recognizing her when she was trying to loose weight. Colie was also over weight and was always called names at school and in public. Colie spent a summer with her aunt in Colby, North Carolina, when her mom was on tour. She thought it would be the worst summer of her life. She had no friends at home so why should she find some here. Although she isn't over weight anymore people see her as many different things. On her vacation she notice that her aunt has a problem too. The man who lives with her aunt lets Colie have a job when she is visiting. When she was working she met two girls, Morgan and Isabel. Theses girls are best friends and want to show Colie what her life is about. Colie goes through many things in Colby. The whole summer was adventures to her. I liked this book a lot. There were many things that people could relate to. How you could make friends, and also how you could see the person inside of you, so you know what you are made of. This book kept my enjoyment from the beginning to the end. I think anyone would enjoy this book.

Although i personally believe that this book was written to point out the views and opinions of a teenage girl, it was also a very well written book. I had the privilege of meeting young author Sarah Dessen in person and she is very well spoken.

The story Keeping The Moon is about a fifteen year old girl named Nicole (Colie) who has escaped the death bearing grips of obesity with her mother Katherine (Kiki). Who, after taking up aerobics and loosing all of her weight, Kiki becomes somewhat of a fitness guru or in lamence terms the Marilyn Monroe of exercise. Even after Colie gets into shape she still manages to find her life presenting more pits than cherries to her.

The story starts off telling us that Kiki goes on a world fitness tour and she sends Colie to spend the summer on the coast of North Carolina with her Aunt Mira. Colie is soon to realize that her Aunt Mira is very eccentric and personally a bit cruede.Soon after moving in with her Aunt, Colie finds a job at The Last Chance Bar & Grill and meets her two best friends, Isabell and Morgan.

This novel has a lot of emotional trends and could easily be mistaken for a modern day teenage soap opera. Keeping The Moon packs a lot of mind bogaling conflicts and sucks you into the play-by-play output of Colies life as a teenage outcast. In conclusion, I would recomend this novel to any teenager. But, as a fair warning to all the guys, it is mostly centered on teenage girls and as a guy it was very hard to follow but no doubt worth it in the long run.

I completely LOVED this book. It was so wonderfully funny and heart-warming... I couldn't put it down! I loved the the character of Mira, Colie's Aunt, who was unique and eccentric. Colie was a wonderful character as well, with a sensitive and loving (more so towards the end) personality.

You will LOVE this book immensley! It is terrific and you will not be able to put it down for anything! Buy it!

If you loved this book as much as I did, then try Sarah Dessen's other books, That Summer, and Someone Like You.

I really can't make my mind up. This is marginally better than "Someone Like You", but I'm so unconvinced that the margin would value a full star.

Let me explain...

(~spoilers~)

This is again a totally unlikely situation, Dessen seems to love plonking her characters in impossible circumstances, apparently to make things more interesting. So what do we have here?

A girl who was ultra-fat with a mother who was ultra-fat, who both managed to shed their fat and entirely change their eating habits within a short time frame. Not just that, the mother becomes a Jane Fonda-style aerobics queen, as rich as you want it, while the girl suffers through high school having never mentally caught up with her loss of weight. She's still being bullied like hell (which sort of stretches credibility, as she now is a) slim and b) daughter of a rich and famous mum), and gets dumped on her aunt for summer holidays. The aunt, guess what?, is as fat as Colie and her mum used to be, a loony artist laughed at by the whole village. In her cellar lives another artist, a boy having similar acceptance problems with his - also rich - father. To fatten unlikely things up a bit we get a beautiful waitress who also once was an ugly (very fat) duckling and Colie's nemesis from school suddenly shows up in her many miles removed summer residence.

Dessen lost me again on the credibility-meter halfway through. Sorry, what a load of bull does she want to sell?

But that's not the worst part, nor that Colie is quite a bit of a whiner, and loads of people are described as being pretty dysfunctional. What angered me was that Dessen at no point questioned the hazing and bullying background she uses to create a plot with. There simply is no criticism of a society which creates a schooling situation that is geared to ostracize and belittle a subset of its members. There's no insight into the fact that what is done there isn't just everyday and not exactly nice, but that it is as much aggression, violation and harm as taking a knife to people. Oh sure, Colie whinges about the bad girls and boys who ridicule her, but at the same time Dessen buys into why they do it too!

It is not some change of the bullies, or awakening of the school system, or authorities, or whatever which puts an end to all this. Instead it is the fact that Colie lost 50 pounds and her new friends show her how to dress nice, how to put on make up and use nail polish and pluck her eyebrows. Colie doesn't deal with the bullying, she changes herself so that she can't be bullied because now she adheres to the concept of artificial and superficial beauty that those bullying her demand. And of course she gets not just one, but two boys in the aftermath of heeling to those societal concepts.

It's not just that Colie, her mum and Isabel severely lose weight to conform with American beauty ideals, they also dress "apropriately," they make up and make their hair over in the "acceptable way." Additionally the non-conforming "hippie-boy" in the cellar becomes acceptable to Colie only because he paints her portrait and auntie Mira is okay only because she does not smart over the hazing and slights she gets from the village.

How sick is that?

So, sorry, the one star is hard earned. That's really the direct opposite of how people ought to react to bullying, and it is enabling of every youth who thinks she just needs to hunger herself into an unhealthy beauty ideal constructed by fashionmakers to become popular.

Not, so absolutely, one hundred percent not how these things ought to be represented to young people.