Book Nook: How the Deer Moon Hungers

In How the Deer Moon Hungers, Mackenzie Fraser knows that her parents aren’t getting back together. Despite her attempts to shelter her seven-year-old sister, Tessa, from the truth, she cannot protect her from brutal realities. Then, on a trip into town, a drunk driver crashes into Tessa, killing her. Because Mackenzie had marijuana in her possession when Tessa died, she is sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile detention center for intent to distribute. In detention, Mackenzie experiences violence and sexual abuse, both from other girls and from staff members. Over the course of eighteen months, she considers her relationships with her parents, her friend Gemma, and others affected by Tessa’s death.

I had a chance to interview the author.

Where did you get the idea for the book?
I walk a stretch of land on a regular basis. It’s a road that ribbons and winds, heaves and dips down to a spot that looks over the Straits of North Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. That same road makes a six-mile loop back to our house. My husband and I live in Friday Harbor, the county seat for the San Juan Island archipelago. The island is small, only about fifty-five square miles and about twenty-five miles, tip to toe. The 2000 census showed a population of only 6,800 souls living here on San Juan Island but there are many other islands in this archipelago.

Anyway, the road we walk regularly was a road that sent chills up and down my spine when we first came to look at the house, the house we ended up buying in 1997. Driving our road is like falling into the rabbit hole. It’s lush and green with trees forming an enormous arboreal tunnel along the roadside. It was the land, not the house that gave me chills. I knew this as soon as I walked into the house and directly out to the backyard, a three-acre field that falls into wetland and a ten-acre pond filled with ducks and other water loving animals. The man showing the house pointed to a depression in the tall grass and said, “Deer.” Deer! Oh my goodness. I’d fallen into heaven.

But if you walk with me, as we walk out of our circular driveway, turn right, which heads west toward the straits. At the first turn south, the road dips for quite a stretch past pasturelands that are abutted by the woods with a few farmhouses hidden and some not. You only know about the hidden homes because of the rustic few mailboxes along the road demarcating their existence. The stretch down and past the straits is stunning in its juxtaposition of ocean and forest―greens and blues, land and sea.

Scenes in two previous books were ignited while walking along this path. So, it didn’t surprise me when the first scene of HOW THE DEER MOON HUNGERS came to mind, where in Chapter One, MacKenzie Fraser and her sister Tessa are riding their bikes along this very stretch of road. But the scene for DEER MOON is different because, on our walk, night was beginning to fall and the moon had risen above a clutch of woods, like it was peeking over to say “Hi” as we walked toward it. I could go on and on about how this story lit up in my mind but the scene I saw play out in my head speaks for itself in Chapter One.

What was something you learned while writing this book?
This is such a great question because I learned so many things while writing this HOW THE DEER MOON HUNGERS. I learned a bunch about the human condition, but I also learned a bunch about writing and what I wanted to do during the writing process. I didn’t want any one person to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. I try to veer away from that in most of my stories. Maybe not so much in my thrillers but definitely in more contemplative works. But writing a good person with some bad traits can be tricky. If you do it wrong, it can seem as though characterizations have been tossed in like dropping marshmallows into a yammy casserole. Everyone sees they haven’t quite blended in but we hope that it tastes sweet anyway. I wanted each of my characters’ questionable traits to ring true. Conversely, I wanted my baddies to have good traits―endearing qualities that made them sympathetic. That was what I learned about the writing process.

As for transformative learning while writing this story, I learned that loss doesn’t slow up. If someone dies, grief plays out for short or long stretches and rises out of nowhere sometimes completely unexpected, of course, depending on each individual. And grief is more painful or less so for each person. Everyone grieves their own way. Some go inward. Some express their grief more openly. Some people cry in front of others while some people hide away to do their crying. It’s these details that make a person who she is. Details in grief and recovery expose so much in a person’s character.

What do you hope readers will take away from this novel?
I hope that people see the hope in this story. That they feel a sense of closure and acceptance. I hope they like the writing, of course. But, mostly, I hope they fall in love with the characters.

Thank you so much for allowing me to talk about HOW THE DEER MOON HUNGERS. This book is extra-special to me.