I won this book through the fantastic GoodReads first reads programme.

This wasn't exactly your typical mystery, nor was it your typical thriller, or typical book really. Picking it up I initially expected a murder mystery, but then it switched into something far more complicated and intricate. I believe that [a:Tanya Parker Mills|2024345|Tanya Parker Mills|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1246385390p2/2024345.jpg] did a superb job of working through the bewildering feeling one gets surrounded by circumstances that they can't comprehend. She did a similarly marvelous job of sinking into the story bit by bit, allowing it to become routine, to become accustomed... then snatching it all away.

This book was truly a fascinating ride, and one I enjoyed taking. If you ever wish to glimpse the strange world of a high functioning person with Aspergers, well, this is as close as you'll get without watching Sherlock. ( )

A Night on Moon Hill
by Tanya Parker Mills
Published by Walnut Springs Press
This book was given to me by the author, with a request that I write an honest and unbiased review.

Dr. Daphne Lessing is a college writing teacher with undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. When she was fifteen, she gave birth to a baby she gave up for adoption because her father was insisting on prosecuting her eighteen-year-old boyfriend for statutory rape unless she gave up the child. Refusing to disclose the father's name, she agrees to adoption. Now she has in one of her graduate seminars Joshua, a brilliant young man--whom she goes home to find dead in her swimming pool. Now things move fast.Joshua has left behind, apparently as a suicide note, a poem connecting the waters of a mother's womb with other waters. He has also left a legacy to Daphne--the knowledge that he is her son; a request that she take custody of his ward Eric, his ten-year-old half-brother, fathered by the father of her son; two million dollars she neither wants nor needs; and all his journals from age eight to the day of his death.

Daphne has never been around young children, and like all Asperger's patients, she is very poor in interpersonal relationships. She emphatically does not want custody of Eric, who has Asperger's and is very difficult. She does not want to cope with the police, the court system, Detective Patrick Clayton (who has a peculiarly strong interest in both her and Eric), Eric's present foster mother, the woman from Family and Children's Services, and everybody else whom fate has thrust upon her, including the book tour her agent and publisher seem to be compelling her to take.

Well . . . not quite fate. Joshua, faced with dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) after watching his birth father die of it, has chosen to commit suicide in his birth mother's swimming pool so that she WILL be forced into taking custody of Eric.

Her department chair puts her on sabbatical starting immediately, in the middle of the semester and running through the end of the summer, to get her emotions under control. She winds up taking Eric for the weekend . . the summer . . . discovering by researching Eric's problems that she has the same problems to a lesser degree . . .applying for permanent custody of him . . . when his still-living birth mother, now married to a particularly disagreeable businessman, suddenly decides she wants to reclaim him. By now Daphne is certain that Eric's mother and stepfather will not be able to cope with Eric's quirks, which include a strong interest in angels and fishing and an extreme reluctance to eat anything but bologna sandwiches made according to Joshua's recipe. Joshua's father, Steve, also ate nothing but bologna sandwiches, even back when he and Daphne between them conceived Joshua in their one sex encounter.

Now devastated by the loss of the fascinating child she originally didn't want, Daphne has to force herself to work cooperatively with other people to get Eric back. But Eric's stepfather, who has no interest other than negative treatment in Eric, has very great interest in Eric's two-million-dollar trust fund.

By the time the denouement is reached, everybody in the book has changed in some way.

I was particularly drawn into this novel for personal reasons: I am a former college writing teacher and I have Asperger's, which was not diagnosed until I was in my fifties. Of course I recognized Daphne's symptoms immediately, within the first few pages of the book, and as Asperger's continued to loom larger and larger in the story, I was compelled to sit up until five AM to finish reading. But I am convinced that any person of compassion will be as drawn into the story as I was. It is a literary triumph which deserves awards it probably will not get; it is also an unusual story of love and loss. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in issues of childhood disabilities that carry over into adulthood, and in overbearing parents and stepparents. I also recommend it for anyone who loves a child and/or literature.

This is one of the most moving books I have ever read.

Anne Wingate
Author of Scene of the Crime and other works of fiction and nonfiction