Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything

SIA MARTINEZ AND THE MOONLIT BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland🌙 🌟 🌵 👽This is by far my favorite YA! I’ve never felt so seen and understood! This book takes place in the Arizona desert among the endless starry skies, saguaro cactus, and supernatural veil between us and the afterlife. And there’s aliens. Us AZ kids grow up obsessed with aliens & space btw. Vasquez Gilliland is a master poet, and her cadence and structure of this book reads like a mix of journal entries sprinkled with verse. It’s the most genre bending book I’ve ever read, and that’s what I love most about it! Contemporary teen romance, coming of age, speculative fiction, poetic, Magical, and Sci Fi!The story is told through 16 year old Artemisia’s eyes after she loses her mother to deportation and a harrowing journey back across the desert. Sia lives with her dad, stands up against racism, and ICE, is well trained in self defense. She’s deeply connected to her abuela who visits her in her corn patch on the warm desert breeze, offering advice when most needed, like abuelas muertas do. Sia and her best friend Rose have such a supportive friendship and help each other through some big life changing events! Sia drives out to the desert almost every night to light candles to guide her mom home through the desert, in hopes that’s she’s still out there 3 years later... and well you’ve gotta read the rest! This book turns into an action packed adventure of survival and badass women taking care of business and standing up for each other!I love everything about this book and I instantly went and bought all the author’s other works. I truly believe this book found me because it wasn’t on my radar at all. It’s changed my life and brought me so much solace and confidence as a Chicana!#SiaMartinesAndTheMoonlitBeginningOfEverything #RaquelVasquezGilliland #IReadYA Find me on Bookstagram @naturemamareads

A wonderful story and a page turner. Enjoyed the story line very much. Great first novel. I do feel the bad language, profanity, was excessive and takes away from the story and characters. In my opinion the story would have been absolutely stellar without ANY profanity. It is not, in my opinion, appropriate for an “audience of 12 and up.”

Everything about this book is stunning. The cover, the characters, the plot, the writing, and the ending were amazing. I totally recommend it. I loved it.

I loved every moment of this book! the author blends contemporary and sci-fi elements and the folk legends passed down by sia’s family into an incredible story.

If you are looking for a book that touches on all of the current challenges we are facing yet gives you the touch of fantasy that gives you hope, this is it. Well written and dealing with contemporary topics, this was exactly the type of novel that I was looking for and I enjoyed every moment.

I love this book so much, and was the perfect book to read right now. It has some of the desert cultura, wonderful strong women, mystery, and beings from outer space. So great, a wonderful journey!!

A great escape from ordinary life with applicable lessons for today. The writer pulls you into another world! Hard to put down!

Ooooh, this was soooo fun. It's probably closer to a 4.5 - it's just not *quite* 5 stars. But I think whatever comes next from this author will be a must-read, because her debut was so great.Sia Martinez is dealing with a really big life-altering event: her mom, who got deported to Mexico by ICE a few years ago, disappeared about 2 years prior to the book's setting trying to cross the desert and come back into the States. She's presumed dead by pretty much everyone - Sia, though, can't always be sure.Sia also has normal problems, like struggling to share her best friend with her best friend's new love interest, being assigned to a school project with the new boy who gets on her nerves, and introducing said new boy who maybe possibly she might have a little crush on to her over-protective, self-defense knowing dad.She ALSO has problems like: she keeps getting in trouble for finishing altercations her racist bully starts (did I mention his dad is the sheriff that helped deport her mom?), her dead bruja grandma constantly making her presence known and telling her that her mom is still alive, and the fact that a UFO keeps flying by her favorite thinking and praying spot in the desert.There was just so much to love about this story. Sia is so unapologetically herself, even the times when she probably should apologize. Her voice as the narrator really takes the story up a notch - she is an open book and is also just really funny. (Here is a good spot for me to say that the Harry Potter references were not only present but veered on the heavy side, and it bummed me out because we know how I feel about this in the year of our Lord 2020)The social issues covered in this book are done really well. There's discussion of immigration and deportation, of course, but also of border cages and racism against Middle Eastern and Black people. There's also a cop who physically abuses his wife and kids - the book doesn't directly discuss the high percentage of this occurrence, but just the representation of it is important, too.This book is really sex-positive, but in an interesting way. Sia was sexually assaulted prior to the book taking place, and it left her pretty adverse to sexual experiences. The love interest, Noah, is so understanding and gentle with her boundaries, and makes sure to get consent on anything that happens. He asks in such a way that is very natural to the situation, and I think this is such a good example of sexual consent for teens to read. There's also a lot of focus on female pleasure in this story, because what Sia is really left with after her assault is a fear of, well, penises.Sia has a really healthy relationship with her dad, there seems to be a really open line of communication there and that's also great to see. Her best friend, Rose, is questioning her sexuality but thinks she's leaning towards identifying as lesbian. She has a female love interest, but she spends a lot of the book acting like they're just friends, and I think their storyline is realistic. Sia and Rose are so used to being each other's one and only that when they both start to be interested in people romantically at the same time, it forms a rift between them that is addressed throughout and I think their friendship is just really special.All this great stuff about the story and I haven't even touched on the sci-fi plot. I will say that I didn't read the synopsis and the big UFO storyline was a complete shock to me - so I recommend going in blind, but if you've read the synopsis you know what happens. Still, there's a lot that happens once contact is made with the UFO, and even though sci-fi isn't always my favorite, I think it's light enough to understand while still being both exciting and allegorical.The way the sci-fi plot wrapped up was definitely unexpected and a little underwhelming; I think it made sense with the story, though. The ACTUAL ending, like the last paragraph, was that little rush of adrenaline you get in certain endings where everything isn't quite what you expected. It very much gave me Stranger Things season 1 vibes - where it's wrapped up nice and tight but with that one loose thread keeping things open for a continuation of the story. I don't know if it will ever get a sequel, but I would be THRILLED to see one.Overall, I clearly highly recommend this story and hope you get a chance to read it soon :')