Reddit reviews The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon

The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon by Tom Spanbauer

Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon. A piece of rural American life in the 1880s, told by a bisexual half-Indian boy known as "Out-in-the-Shed", or just Shed - a tavern prostitute who lives and works in the gold-rush town of Excellent, Idaho.

This is a FANTASTIC book. There's sex, there's greed, there's the question of religious influence on the expanding Midwest (Mormon missionaries up from Utah try to move into the town for their own reasons, and the battle with the tavern owner is damn pernicious :D), there's the unresolved question of half of Shed's parentage, there's all sorts of quirky characters and plot tangents that I just can't explain all at once here. It's really awesome.

What really makes this book for me is the way even bit-part characters are described so well you never know how long they're going to last through the story - like the character remembers them so well he only needs to mention a name or an outfit in order to bring the rest of them back out in the open, like you want to know more about them just from the hints he drops.

Another thing I like about the tone of this book - they don't shy away from anything. They use drugs and they have sex, like any other family I think would be worth knowing; their lives are messy and complex and visceral and more interesting than mine or probably yours, and reading about them made me think: how bad are some of the choices I've made, really, compared to what's happened here?