When the Moon Was Ours

“Without her, he had been nameless. He had not been Samir or Sam. He has been no one. They knew his name no more than they knew who this girl had been before she was water.”

This moment foreshadows the deep connection and codependency between Miel and Sam. Although both lived chapters of their life before they met, their lives intertwining represented a transformative rebirth for them both. The act of embracing his name displays how Sam’s relationship with Miel gave him the strength to acknowledge and accept his inner self, despite spending his early years in conflict with his outer self.

“The understanding settled on her that it was Sam, not that wooden-hilted brush, that held the magic of turning a vine-laced field into a thousand pumpkins.”

Miel’s realization provides one of the early hints of the novel’s overarching theme of Transformation. The narrative balances supernatural transformations with natural botanical or seasonal transformations like this agricultural practice. Here Miel realizes that scientific processes found in nature are a kind of magic as well, no less extraordinary for being rooted in the concrete world. Sam’s pollination of the pumpkins allows him to share another, unexpected parallel with Miel who also makes things grow—in her case, roses from her wrist.

“He never took off his shirt for the same reason he worked on the Bonners’ farm. Their school let his work weeding the fields and cutting vines stand in for the PE requirement he’d put off since ninth grade. He couldn’t meet it any other way, not if it meant changing for class or team practice in a locker room.”

The novel’s exploration of Gender Identity happens without ever using the word “transgender.” Instead, Anna-Marie McLemore creates a character with rich interiority navigating his life as a transgender boy revealed through his relationships, experiences, and inner thoughts. Sam’s reference to his job and his PE requirement is one of the first clues given about Sam’s birth gender—a story that McLemore reveals gradually. This moment also hints at the secrecy surrounding Sam’s identity, the type of community he lives in, and the potential danger and conflict he and his mother will face if the truth becomes known.

“They gave her the same inconsistency that they might give a lover, adoration at night, disavowal in the morning. How indebted they were to her meant they offered her either scorn or respect, depending on the time of day and how many people were watching.”

Aracely exists on a similar social precipice to Sam even without taking her own complex Gender Identity into account. Her gold skin and her work performing cures for heartsickness cause the people in the town to view her with equal parts judgment and secret fascination. She survives by making herself useful to the community, yet it is this same practice that keeps her isolated and at the fringe of a society that doesn’t fully accept her. This not only highlights some of the challenges facing Aracely and Miel, but the stigma and limitations that characterize their social world in general—stigmas that inform numerous events of the novel’s overarching plot.

“If anyone called Lian dim, the Bonner girls would have scratched them to bleeding with their unfixed, bright-polished nails, but that wouldn’t mean they didn’t agree.”

This moment highlights both the loyal, symbiotic relationship the Bonner girls share with each other and the distance that has grown between them. Initially, this observation appears to reinforce the tribe mentality of the family and the way each will fiercely protect the others from outside influence. Later, however, it’s revealed that Lian’s “dimness” is only a façade, and her sisters’ ignorance demonstrates that they’re not as symbiotic as they think they are.

“They thought Miel could give them back whatever they had lost. They didn’t understand that the only way to do that would be for Chloe to never have gone away. Chloe was a tree ripped out of and then planted back into an orchard, her roots and the roots of every tree near her shocked by the turning over of earth.”

McLemore uses botanical and agricultural imagery as a motif throughout the novel. Each central character is affected by the natural landscape around them in different ways, and this moment illustrates the way the Bonner girls are intrinsically tied to their family’s land. Removing Chloe from that landscape figuratively and literally created a period of upheaval, which only becomes exacerbated by their efforts to reverse time.

“The lies in the Bonner girls’ hands were a thousand pairs of scissors, brass and tarnished. If they spread that story, her mother’s soul would never be free of it. It would follow her, pin its weight to her and drag her down.”

This moment establishes the narrative stakes for the protagonists. Whether the Bonners’ lies truly could have inflicted social and spiritual damage is left to the reader’s interpretation; however, their threat causes Miel to feel responsible for the choices and actions of others, a personal flaw central to her arc throughout the story. Without these personal stakes for the characters, the story would lose its tension and collapse.

“She fell in love with men who didn’t call, or men who did call and who she scared off with her gratitude and hurry. In her early thirties, hell-bent on getting married before thirty-five, she ended up sobbing on Aracely’s table at least once a season.”

This moment foreshadows Ms. Owens’s inadvertent betrayal by highlighting her need for human connection. Her desire to be married suggests a traditional adherence to societal norms, while her propensity for falling in love quickly and rapidly suggests a loneliness that the Bonner girls use to their advantage. Rather than working through her challenges with communication and introspection, Ms. Owens turns to the magic of others to solve her problems, making her an easy target for those willing to offer a solution to her loneliness.

“She knew what he was, the tension in the fact that, to anyone who didn’t understand, there was contradiction between how he lived and what he had under his clothes.”

Miel’s introspection highlights the stigma Sam faces in the world around him, yet her tone is without judgment. Rather than finding malice and cruelty in these embedded social constructs, Miel recognizes a lack of understanding and information. Because she is a cisgender person in love with a transgender person, Miel becomes an extension of other cisgender readers trying to sensitively and compassionately understand a minority identity outside their own.

“Aracely’s lovesickness cure often made people sleep for days. They felt fine at first, awake and alive, and then they sank into relief and exhaustion. Once the lovesickness cure had made a man fall asleep to the rust-coloured leaves of late November and wake to the first snow silvering his window.”

This moment exemplifies the magical realism aspect of the novel while also highlighting the trying, exhaustive aftermath of love. Here, the passage of time is a metaphor for the healing process that follows heartbreak. While Aracely’s clients’ healing is the result of an external influence—namely, Aracely’s gift—it follows the natural progression of the body recovering from an ordeal.

“The water had felt her sorrow, her broken heart because she had failed to save her sister. That sorrow had aged her heart, made her grown instead of a child. So the water made the outside of her show the truth in all ways, not just by making her a woman, but by making her old enough to match her bitter heart.”

Earlier, Sam notes that Aracely isn’t old enough to be Miel’s lost mother, since she’s not yet 30. Here, Aracely explains to Sam that the trauma she experienced forced her to leave her childhood behind—a metaphorical Transformation manifested physically by the water in the form of her new body.

“The fact that Aracely might understand what he could not say, it seeded in him a want, new and raw, like not knowing he was thirsty until water was in front of him. No one else, not his mother, not even Miel, could understand this wanting to live a life different from the one he was born into.”

Here, Sam recognizes the extent of his own isolation for the first time. Even though he has supportive friends and family around him, his journey to understand his Gender Identity is something he can only do alone. This solitude is a tragic yet necessary part of the journey many young people take in pursuit of self-discovery, regardless of identity. To a degree, both Miel and Aracely face similar isolation in their own arcs toward self-discovery and acceptance.

“But if the moon in the sky could move whole oceans, then maybe, if he wanted it enough, every moon he’d made could pull at this water.”

McLemore uses water as a motif throughout the novel. The river changes both Miel’s and Aracely’s lives—transforming Aracely’s, saving Miel’s, and taking their mother’s. The relationship between water and the moon parallels the connection their family has with Sam’s, and the way Sam’s journey ultimately guides Miel’s actions.

“She didn’t know the safe ways to touch him, or whether she should say his name, let the word Sam off her tongue when he was touching her and she barely had the breath for it. She didn’t know if it would remind him that she wanted him, or if it would just remind him that he did not want to be a girl called Samira.”

In When the Moon was Ours, McLemore explores the perspectives of both a transgender character and their cisgender lover to create an emotionally nuanced love story. Drawing on their own real-life experiences as a nonbinary/bigender person married to a transgender man, McLemore highlights Miel’s uncertainty in a new, intimate situation, underscoring the scene with sensitivity and honesty.

“Not perfect and polished, not like Nina Chan, one of the girls who knew as well as Sam that if they wanted this town to love them, they’d have to give themselves nicknames.”

Names play an important role in the novel, forming synecdochic relationships with the characters on their arcs toward self-discovery and acceptance. Sam’s nickname (“moon”) forms the word “honeymoon” when paired with Miel’s (whose name is Spanish for “honey”), highlighting their connection. The tension Sam feels between the three different versions of his birth name (Samira, Samir, and Sam) reflect the inner conflict as he learns to embraces his true self and Gender Identity. In this passage, Sam references Nina Chan, the town’s pumpkin queen, suggesting she adjusted her name to one more common in English in order to fit in at school. This minor detail broadens the story’s world and gives a clearer picture of the stigma attached to racial, ethnic, sexuality or gender-nonconforming difference in their environment.

“Her mother had died not just in the water, but in a way only a broken heart could kill. Not with the kind of love sickness Aracely cured. Not longing for a lover. Her mother’s heart was the kind of broken caused by children, one who grew forbidden petals from her skin, and the other who lost his life trying to save her.”

Miel’s introspection highlights her tendency to accept responsibility for those she loves, blaming herself and her difference for her mother’s death. Water is a transformative force for both Miel and Aracely, and here it becomes transformative in another way: By taking the life of Miel and Aracely’s mother, the water carried her from life into death.

“It was his. All of it was his. His body, refusing to match his life. His heart, bitter and worn. His love for Miel, even if it had nowhere to go, even if he didn’t know how to love a girl who keeps herself as distant from him as an unnamed constellation.”

Although the central characters all have unconventional journeys, Sam and Miel both travel coming-of-age arcs, learning to define and embrace their true selves. In this moment, Sam takes ownership of his Gender Identity and his feelings for Miel, acknowledging each one as an integral facet of his being. In doing so, he reclaims his own power from people like the Bonner girls who would weaponize these things against him.

“Miel would not think of her mother, frantic and clawing the flesh out of a pumpkin big enough to hold Miel. She would blot out that memory with the yellow of the kitchen table, and the shades of the pumpkin rinds, and the smell of dark sugar in the air as she and Aracely passed each other spoons of sage and fireweed honey.”

Much like Sam reclaims his own power by embracing his entire being, Miel attempts to reclaim her personal power by overcoming her greatest fear. She acknowledges that she has been shaped by trauma, but knows it is not her foundation; she finds new strength in the home and family she has accumulated around her, which allows her to live in the present moment rather than being controlled by the past.

“Maybe if Peyton had just been Peyton, instead of one of four bright-haired girls, she would have seemed more like a friend and less like a force. But they would always be the Bonner sisters, a truth that both guarded and isolated them.”

This moment highlights the novel’s theme of Family Versus Independence, demonstrating the loss of individual identity and autonomy that the Bonner sisters experience, and hinting at the friendships they could have had if they had not been so symbiotically intertwined. Peyton and Sam in particular have a complex relationship that hovers on the cusp of a friendship but never quite solidifies. This missed connection is one of the elements that makes the Bonners’ relationship with Miel so tragic, and creates the feeling of a lost opportunity to communicate, grow and connect.

“The butterflies had not brought her here. Yes, they might have turned her hair a color to match them. But they had not given her to this town the way the water had. They were a celebration of her emergence, a sign of her appearing.”

The novel uses butterflies as a motif to signify Aracely’s Transformation as well as her rebirth. Not unique to McLemore’s worldbuilding, butterflies have long been associated with both these elements in a range of different cultures. Here, however, the narrative subverts this classic symbolism by using the butterflies as harbingers rather than a transformative force in and of themselves.

“That was the cruelest thing about losing someone. In being lost, they became so many different people, even more than when they were there.”

This moment emphasizes the idea of lost potential, rather than lost reality. As Miel faces her impending death, the possibilities of the person she might become if she lived feel endless. Sam finds himself mourning those possibilities of what she could have become. Prior to this plot point, Miel’s relationships with both Sam and Aracely had reached a turning point; with her destruction, those relationships are destroyed before they’ve truly begun.

“But this is what she would be now, his shadow, an echo of what he once was and thought he would be again. She would be less like someone he was supposed to become, and more like a sister who lived in places he could not map, a sister who kept a light but constant grasp on both his hand and his grandmother’s.”

While Sam’s true Gender Identity differs from the name (Samira) and body he was born into, he acknowledges that Samira is someone with whom he has a tangible and eternal connection. By honoring this person and allowing her to occupy a place in his story, Sam also maintains a connection with his heritage and the traditions of his loved ones.

“She had a name. Through all the glances and whispers, she’d had her own name, a name Chloe had given her. And until tonight, Miel had never known it. Worse, she’d never even wondered.”

Throughout the novel, names wield a kind power over people, rendering them tangible and complete. A large part of Sam’s journey involves grappling with the names given to or claimed by him—a tension he recognizes in the lives of others as well. Chloe’s baby isn’t made truly real for Miel until this moment, when she hears the name Chloe gave her. By naming her baby, Chloe also takes some of her identity back from her sisters.