Title: The Craters in the Moon
Author: jetaime26
Genres: Teen Fiction/Romance
Description:Arden Gray: A catty, beautiful, endlessly underestimated teenage girl drowning in a crippling tidal wave of depression. She spends more time in the realm of books than reality, and struggles to keep her head above water as her world seemingly comes crashing down around her.
Lucas Riverton: The seventeen year old boy in the awkward stage between child and adulthood, who works at a local bookstore as a means of escape. He barely knows Arden, but is positive that there is something about her, something he wants to devote the rest of his life to figuring out.
Two worlds connect in an unfathomable force as young lovers relish in the discovery of a feeling that is beyond description--- and do everything in their power to prevent the inevitable destruction of it.
Review:
I've been wracking my brain for almost five minutes now trying to figure out how to start this. Most reviews I'll lay out my expectations before reading the story and then how the story actually compared. Well, this one basically lived out my exact expectations, which isn't a bad thing considering that I thought it would probably be amazing. Most people on Wattpad use the story description as an opportunity to demonstrate their ostentatious abilities and virtual showmanship, but this author goes the more basic route and offers a simple summary as her description. While many people require an eye-grabbing description complete with a glowing sign that says "Read me!", I thought this summary was refreshingly blunt and lacking the usual pre-story posturing. This continued consistently throughout the story, never trying to convince the reader that it's something it's not.
One of the things that I found interesting about it is that the main character suffers from severe depression, yet doesn't experience what I call "trauma drama" in the book. Most stories seem to feel a compulsion to make the character suffer some sort of emotional trauma in their past; a parent died when they were little, the parents got divorced and they never got over it, or maybe they were bullied or something when they were young in school. Think about it--Batman's parents were shot by a robber, Spiderman's were spies killed in a plane crash, and something probably happened to the Twilight girl because no one is that weird naturally. It's always something, and it's supposed to serve the purpose to evoke sympathy for the main character, even though most people get annoyed by it and just wish that for once they could read a book where the character lives a relatively trouble-free life. This story had a really good balance between having emotional conflict in it yet not filling every page with the main character's childhood sob story. The main character deals with deep depression, yet there's nothing in her life to really warrant it. Sure her parents fight, but which ones don't? I thought it was a really unique idea to make a character who is depressed for almost no reason. It happens a lot in real life, yet is rarely touched upon in fiction. It was a nice change from most stories that are the other way around.
Arden Gray (beautiful name, by the way) is a unique and quirky character that I found myself growing attached to right away. The book starts with her making a less-than-enthusiastic trip to the psychologist's office. I thought it was a very original and fun way to start the story. It was a good way to introduce the main character and show us her life, family situation, and personality without running full-throttle into the plot. And, having learned more about her, I began to like her as a character a lot.
As I mentioned before, Arden suffers from depression without much of a reason for it. She seems to have a very introverted personality; she has friends that she visits, yet she doesn't want to stay long and is relatively aloof around them when she's there. I thought that that helped to emphasize her depression--even those who are supposed to make us feel the best made her feel worse. Most people go through at least some form of depression at some point in their teenage years, so I thought that Arden's emotional troubles were very relatable for the average reader and had the effect of forming a tighter bond between the reader and the character.
One thing that I enjoyed about Arden is her constant reading. For one thing, I found it amusingly ironic that she loves to read so much when she is the main character of a book. Like most readers dealing with depression, I assume that she reads to escape from the harsh realities of life to a different world in which happy endings are possible (it may actually say this in the story, but it's been three days since I read it--I didn't even know it was possible to have writer's block with a review until now). But when she goes to the bookstore to buy a book, she meets a new boy whom I'm guessing she eventually falls in love with. So, this is what I really liked: Arden reads constantly to escape reality, but it's because of her reading that she meets a real guy who pulls her back to earth. I thought that added a poetic layer of depth to the romance that I enjoyed, whether the author intended it or not.
So, about this boy. At first, I wasn't impressed with him. The first time he appears in the story, Arden comments on his cocky appearance and the fact that he's staring openly at her breasts. I was tempted to groan out loud and was thinking, "Oh no, not another shygirlxbadboy story." I thought that this story was trying to prove the old maxim 'opposites attract', but I was wrong. I was very pleasantly surprised when Arden's first impression of Lucas was way off-base, something that rarely happens in fiction for some reason.
As the story progressed from their first encounter, I was becoming increasingly happy with the story as it continually strayed off of the path of the cliche. In the case of most stories on this site, once the girl meets the boy she feels a strange attraction to him that pulls them closer despite logic and rationality. In this story however, while she does express positive feelings for his kindness towards her, she lacks the flaming passion that teens feel the need to randomly insert into their stories these days, and in fact she ends up going out of her way to avoid him. And once Lucas was in the story enough for me to get a good idea of his personality, I once again realized that this story wasn't trying to prove 'opposites attract'. While the two of them do have their differences--for example, Lucas' more open and genial demeanor compared to Arden's more taciturn and reticent personality--I feel like it's the similarites between the two of them that were really drawing them together.
Lucas made me laugh on several occasions because he reminds me of so many of my own friends. The story summary describes him as "The seventeen year old boy in the awkward stage between child and adulthood", and I think that that's definitely accurate. While he's a relatively new character in the story and hasn't been in too much of it, I can see that he's kind, yet also slightly immature and not quite used to being an older teen yet. I think that the author did a fantastic job crafting him as a character--he's not the perfect guy that everyone wants to fall in love with, yet he seems to be the perfect match for Arden.
Another thing I liked about this was the dialogue and the way it was structured. It really helps emphasize Arden's emotional state in my opinion. Since the story is told in the first person, we as readers are constantly hearing each of her depressed thoughts, so we have an inside look at her character that the other characters in the story don't. The dialogue shows how much she really hides from people compared to what she's thinking, and I thought that was very well done. The author also does a good job of executing the dialogue in emotional situations--I could feel Arden's derision toward the psychologist, her anger and hurt when her mom told her that she was leaving for a few days, her awkwardness when she first met Lucas, and his concern for her when she has a breakdown. A lot of people on this site like to give the advice "Show, don't tell," but I say that as long as telling is well written and serves its purpose, go for it. And this author manages to pack more emotion in one sentence of dialogue than most people can in a whole paragraph of metaphorical description.
Overall, I thought this book was extremely well written and entertaining with an original-but-not-too-original plotline. I recommend it for any teen fiction and romance fan looking to get away from the cliche, as well as any teen dealing with depression who might find Arden to be a relatable character.
Click on the external link if you wish to read this story.
