Luna: A Novel by Julie Ann Peters

This was a phenomenal story about struggle and rebirth. The story focuses on a transgendered guy through the eyes of his sister. And quite honestly I didn't go to sleep last night as I read it from start to finish.

The whole story is about how Luna (Liam's true self) is trapped within Liam, and Liam is a construction what the most acceptable way he can exist without revealing his true self turns out to be, which throughout the book we are told is like a shell of a person. Regan, the sister, has known from a young age that her brother is really a sister and devotes her entire life to keeping up the facade of Liam and dealing with Luna's problems. As a result Regan doesn't really have an identity. Both she and Luna are repressed 'Liam' Liam being society's rejection of transgendered individuals, and 'Liam' stifles those who know the truth to the point where the death of the individual wouldn't matter because the spirit, their soul, is already dead, crushed by society's rigid rejection. As depressing as that sounds however, this book is a phoenix rising out of the ashes story. For most of the novel everyone rejects Luna, even Regan and Liam as they are more embarrassed and wanting to keep Luna underground more than anything else. As the story progresses however, Luna decides that she needs to make herself known, she needs to break free, so she hesitantly goes about doing this, at first just recognizing this fact, than taking ever growing steps toward freedom. People accept or reject her as this process takes shape, but the only viewpoints the readers focus in on are Luna/ Liam's and Regan's. We never hear the final conclusion the other characters come to, which is appropriate as we can fill in our own selves or those we know into those characters, because this is very much an unfinished story as sexism still exists in a huge way today.

For most of the book Regan is just used as a lense through which the reader can learn about Luna and has no personality or character of her own, but she along with Luna, comes to the realization that she has no 'self' because of 'Liam' and though she doesn't act on it the way Luna does, she gets proddings from the outside world (in the shape of a new guy in school) to bring attention to her own life and not focus everything on Luna.

I teared up a few times reading this. Everyone has an inner self to let out, it's a struggle we all go through, some more so than others.