Rod Raglin
This blog will touch on the experiences I have as a writer (not to be mistaken for my experience as a writer, i.e. how many books I've written, etc); the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the satisfaction and the frustration, the magic and the reality - have I left anything out, oh yeah, the rejection, rejection and more rejection, the humiliation and the embarrassment, the jealousy and the resentment - that pretty much covers it, except for why I do it which perhaps I'll realize along the way. Are you totally confused? Good, let's begin.
Crying for the Moon - a dreary, tawdry series of events lacking in motivation
Maureen comes from a working class family in St John's, Newfoundland. She's a senior in a Catholic parochial high school.
Even though she can't sing she fakes her way into the school choir so she can travel as part of the group to Montreal and perform at Expo '67, the world's fair taking place there in 1967.
As soon as she arrives, her and a girlfriend go AWOL and hit the Montreal nightlife.
Before you can say " G'wan with cha" she gets drunk and wakes up in a strange hotel room having lost her virginity as well as her girlfriend.
Evidently not big deal.
She goes back to the hotel, don't know that she ever performs at Expo, but the next night is out looking for her girlfriend in the same bars and has sex with another, more or less anonymous guy all the while not enjoying it one bit, which makes this reader wonder why she does it?
Not wanting to hang around with someone she hardly knows she ends up at yet another bar, gets dead drunk and has sex with an "old man".
Back home and back at Catholic school in St. John's she throws up on a nun's habit and is announced pregnant and kicked out of school.
Her mother, "the Sarge" tells her she isn't going to sit around so she gets a part time job in a discount store where all the other employees hate her.
There's more, but none of it has any motivation, there's little character development - it is just one grim situation after another.
Why would a "good" girl attending a Catholic school, suddenly go on a sex and drinking binge just because she's away from home?
I never found out because I abandoned Crying for the Moon after three chapters. Blame it on a really unsympathetic character and an inability to suspend disbelief.
This is a good example of a "celebrity book". The publisher knows the author's fame in other endeavours, in this case author Mary Walsh being somewhat of an comic icon in Canada, will sell enough books to make a profit.
Maybe stick to comedy, Mary, or was this book supposed to be a joke and I just didn't get it?
