norb reviewed When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
t's a whole new moooooon.
One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as …
Not The Book I Expected, But Maybe The One I Needed
5 stars
Content warning Spoilers throughout. You've been warned!
Wow! I really, really liked this book. It was not at all what I expected. The entire premise is just absurd. I expected the story to also be just as absurd, but it ... wasn't.
Scalzi has approached this book, like his last two, from a point of realism. The premise is, of course, absolutely insane. The moon becomes "cheese" (an organic matrix I think is the way book NASA states it). That is impossible! But the book characters also know it is impossible!
The entire structure of this isn't much of a story. It's more a rumination on what might the moon turning to cheese really be like? How might people react? What might some real consequences be? Each chapter is a day of the lunar cycle, and they focus on different people. There are some repeat characters and some mentions of characters across chapters, but really the Cheese Moon (Of course Scalzi gives us a "real" name for it - Caseus) is the main character.
About 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through, there is a real bit of danger that comes kind of out of nowhere. And from then on the book becomes a series of explorations of death, of relationships, and of consequences.
And then there's the end. I marked this for spoilers, so here's the spoiler. The moon just turns back to normal at the end of the lunar cycle. No explanation given - just like none was given for why it changed in the first place. It was really a huge Steven King moment for me (an ending that is just kind of like ... well I don't know where to go next so yeah it was insert easy way out). And for a minute I was like "Oh no Scalzi... not you too!"
But then, the last two chapters. One 10 years out and one I think 100 years out, I didn't do the math... those two, very short chapters are what sold me. Those two chapters made the ending have a point. They showed us one of our major flaws, which is that hindsight is never 20/20. History is never what we think it is. And, given enough time and enough misinformation and enough humanity - we will forget the truth. We will make it something else. And that was a powerful ending to the dumbest premise ever turned into a full novel.