It's all in Moth's voice, and her words dance, giving the reader a real sense of how she could move her body if she wasn't afraid to. Novels in verse can sometimes feel awkward, but “Me (Moth)” spills effortlessly across the page, becoming the song that Moth and Sani write together on their journey. Then when their adults fail them, they decide to leave together on a road trip across the country to see Sani's father, and hope to make some sense of their tangled mass of trauma on the way. And she's drawn irresistibly to his flame. He sings when he thinks no one is listening and he sees Moth like no one else does. He lives with his mom and stepdad, having left his father behind on the Navajo Nation reservation in New Mexico.

Until the new boy at school, Sani, notices her. Her survivor's guilt is so strong that she makes herself almost invisible. Now she doesn't dance anymore and lives with her grieving aunt, wearing borrowed clothes and living on what feels like borrowed time, because not even the wisdom and Hoodoo passed down to her by her Rootworker grandfather can bring back her family or ease her pain. She was a Julliard-bound dancer with a loving, supportive family - until a terrible car accident took them all away and left her scarred, inside and out. Moth is a shadow of the girl she once was. “Me (Moth)” may feature a list of sightseeing stops and a series of motels, but it defies the road trip genre, carving out a pensive path through ancestry, trauma, and art. You can “Priscilla Queen of the Desert” or you can “Thelma and Louise.” But maybe there's another journey to be had. Road trip stories tend to fall into two categories - wild adventures of self-discovery where things turn out okay in the end, or grim, outlaws-on-the run tragedies.

Moth amber mcbride