Robin GowCritiques

Gr 5 Up—After losing his best friend, Noah tries to find and befriend the local cryptid, Mothman. In the process, he
finds himself a group of supportive new friends. This beautiful look at gender identity, neurodiversity, strength, and
friendship will resonate with readers young and old.

Noah writes a series of letters to Mothman, a cryptid that was of interest to his best friend. Noah's reeling over his best friend's death. Noah is autistic and sharing his identity and chosen name to friends and parents.
Noah is sad and going through a big emotional journey throughout the book. He finds a new group of friends and a romantic interest. All the while he journals and writes to the ellusive Mothman. Letters from Hannah pepper the text as well.

This novel's sentences were broken up interestingly instead of put in paragraphs, but I thought it was only particularly lyrical or verse-like in a couple of chapters, countable on one hand.

I also found it difficult to follow. It wasn't clear to me from what point in time Claire, the narrator, is describing events—time contracts and expands in confusing ways. I read an ARC, so take this with a grain of salt, but due to inconsistencies of quotation punctuation and the aforementioned interestingly broken up sentences, it was frequently difficult to tell who was speaking in conversations. Also, Claire is often addressing things to her lost car, Lars, but then in the next sentence seems to forget that. She mentions grandparents who seem to be living but at other points says her grandparents are all deceased. For these reasons, and pickier ones (like, why is this teenager in what seems to be the current year only name dropping bands from the early 2000s?) it didn't really click with me.