Graffiti Moon Review

TITLE Graffiti Moon
AUTHOR Cath Crowley
PUBLICATION February 14th 2012 by Knopf Books
READ March 04 to 05, 2013
SOURCE Gifted from Giselle of Xpresso Reads

Senior year is over, and Lucy has the perfect way to celebrate: tonight, she's going to find Shadow, the mysterious graffiti artist whose work appears all over the city. He's out there somewhere—spraying color, spraying birds and blue sky on the night—and Lucy knows a guy who paints like Shadow is someone she could fall for. Really fall for. Instead, Lucy's stuck at a party with Ed, the guy she's managed to avoid since the most awkward date of her life. But when Ed tells her he knows where to find Shadow, they're suddenly on an all-night search around the city. And what Lucy can't see is the one thing that's right before her eyes.

I’m sitting here trying to decide how to start this review and I can’t figure it out. So I figured I would start out by telling you that I’m trying to figure out how to start it. I’m pretty late to the party with reading this one, about 90% of my Goodreads friends have read it and loved it, so I kind of feel as if I can’t really bring anything new to the table, all I can do is enforce Graffiti Moon’s awesomeness in some small way. And that’s exactly what this novel is; awesome. It’s a story that takes place in a single night but has characters and a plot with so much development that it feels like it spans much more time.

I guess that’s where my love for this novel really begins. I have always loved movies that take place in one single crazy night; Dazed & Confused, Can’t Hardly Wait, Go and Superbad are some that come to mind and this novel is up there with the best of them. What always surprises me with tales such as this is how well I end up feeling like I know the characters even though I only meet them for a single night of their life. Lucy was such a great character. She struggled with what was happening at home (who wouldn’t worry when their dad starts nailing a new address on the shed in the backyard) and she is on a mission to finally meet Shadow, the graffiti artist she has been lusting over forever. I loved her inner dialogue, she was so intelligent and funny & those elements of her personality are really brought out around her two best friends, Daisy & Jazz. I freaking loved all of these girls! Daisy was a tough cookie and she gave men such a hard time, it was hilarious. And Jazz was a really good friend and such a free spirit. I loved all of these girls and the moments when they were locked inside a bathroom stall plotting were the best.

We also have the boys in this tale Ed & Leo (or Shadow & Poet) and they were just as wonderful as the ladies. They were deep, they had substance, & they weren’t just looking to get into the girls’ pants (though there’s no denying they would have loved that perk.) I loved how into art and literature they were. Ed knew all the greats and had took such great joy in looking at pieces and conversing about artists. Poet’s poems were amazing and raw, I loved the snippets that we got from him here and there in verse, they worked so well. As I had said in the beginning and as I have enforced now the characters, though we only know them for a short snippet of time, are so well developed and full.

I think much of the characters development can be attributed to Crowley’s perfect use of flashbacks. There was lots of reminiscing but never did the flashbacks feel out of place or awkward. I came to love these characters so much and I wanted to know their history so that I could get a better understanding of them so I always appreciated going through memories with them. It’s a pretty fast paced story, as you can imagine from the time line, and a novel that I breezed through pretty fast. Another thing that keeps you sucked in is the wonderful imagery in the novel. I loved hearing about the richness of colors in all of Shadow’s paintings and his yearning for the perfect shade of blue. It was all so beautiful and I could have easily read another 200 pages.

A novel full of romance, full of humor and full of art; Graffiti Moon is not one to be missed. Don’t let the hype scare you because this one has earned every single bit of hype it has ever received. Crowley has just put herself on my authors to watch list and I will be picking up her previous book as well as watching for anything she does in the future.