5. Historical Fiction or Fact: Moon Over Manifest

            Citation:

            Vanderpool, Clare. Moon Over Manifest. New York: Random House, 2010. eBook.

Annotation:

12 year old Abilene Tucker is sent to live in Manifest, Kansas with pastor Shady after injuring her leg, while dangling it out of a boxcar.  Deprived of her hobo traveling life style, she spends the summer discovering what happened in Manifest in the year 1918.

Justification for Nomination:

Abilene is exploring who she is and where she belongs.  She has never had a place to call home and has lived a nomadic lifestyle.  This town is the place her father used to call home and she wants to explore the foot prints he left behind.  After hearing the story about the mysterious Jinx and his friend Ned she learns more about the town and begins to feel like it is home. 

In the writing style of the author was very descriptive about the details of the setting and the characters.  One very vivid description that was given was about Miss Sadie’s badly welded fence with the word “perdition” on the gate.  Shady was a character that was described very well and more description was probably put into him because he is very strange, running a church and an illegal bar out of his home.

The narrative in this particular story is interesting because it had two different styles.  The first style is the first person narrative from Abilene’s point of view.  The second narrative style happens when Miss Sadie is telling the story about Jinx.  This second narrative style is third person omniscient.  It felt like a very interesting way to tell this story.

Abilene grows as a character because she tries to distance herself from relationships with people and at the end of the book she has learned about the people of town and embraced it as her home.  She also discovers and accepts the reason why her father left her alone in Manifest.  The plot for the story is solving a mystery in 1936 about what happened to the town in 1918.  The most thrilling parts of the story take place in the telling of what happened in 1918. 

Genre: 

Historical Fiction / Mystery