Review: "Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool

"Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool is a coming of age story, a mystery, and a history lesson all rolled into one. Abilene is a girl without a home. She doesn't mind, though.  That's how things have always been--just her and Gideon, her father, hopping train cars and travelling from place to place. Home is wherever they're together. But when Gideon sends her away to life in Manifest, Kansas, with no notion of when he'll come to get her again, Abilene truly feels adrift. Seh searches the town and its stories for signs of her father and the childhood he had there, but Gideon's past proves elusive. What she finds instead are new friends and a decades old town mystery. By listening to the stories of townsfolk and a little bit of snooping, Abilene learns all about a boy named Jinx, his friend Ned, and the town that Manifest used to be long before the Depression. Along the way, she also learns a lot about her father and herself.

Clare Vanderpool ingeniously weaves together two stories from two different pivotal periods in American History to educate the reader about both the Great War and the Great Depression. "Moon Over Manifest" also deals with issues surrounding immigration, racial inequality and prejudice, death, loss, and poverty. The multiple mysteries help keep the reader interested. Listening to the audiobook, it's easy to keep the storylines straight as the production used three separate voice actors, enabling the listening experience to better mirror the use of distinct font and styling to separate voices in the print version. School Library Journal recommends this book for grades five to eight, but I would recommend it to teens and adults as well.

--Madeline B., Mid County