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Book Reviewed by:Told in an extraordinary and wholly unique voice that will candidly take you into the mind of a curious and deeply human character.
Meet Ginny Moon. She's mostly your average teenager—she plays flute in the school band, has weekly basketball practice and reads Robert Frost poems for English class. But Ginny is autistic. And so what's important to her might seem a bit…different: starting every day with exactly nine grapes for breakfast, singing along to Michael Jackson, taking care of her baby doll…and crafting a secret plan of escape.
Ginny has been in foster care for years and for the first time in her life she has found her "forever home." After being traumatically taken from her abusive birth mother and moved around to different homes, she is finally in a place where she'll be safe and protected, with a family who will love and nurture her. This is exactly the kind of home that all foster kids are hoping for. But Ginny has other plans. She'll steal and lie and reach across her past to exploit the good intentions of those who love her—anything it takes to get back what's missing in her life. She'll even try to get herself kidnapped.
Ginny Moon is at once quirky, charming, heartbreaking, suspenseful and poignant. It's a story of a journey, about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and about making sense of a world that just doesn't seem to add up.
Benjamin Ludwig completely captures his young protagonist, and as a result Ginny Moon is without doubt one of the finest novels I've read all year. I whole-heartedly recommend it for a wide audience, including young adult readers; book groups in particular will find much material for discussion...continued
Full Review
(684 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
In Ginny Moon, the protagonist's participation in the Special Olympics plays an important part in the storyline.
The Special Olympics is the world's largest sports organization for individuals with intellectual disabilities. From its modest start as a summer camp in 1962, the Special Olympics now offers competition in more than 30 different sports with over 100,000 events organized annually across the world. Like other Olympic athletes, participants start with local competitions and work their way up to regionals and nationals before competing at the international level. The Summer and Winter games alternate every two years ("odd" years, so as not to conflict with the Olympic Games that are held in "even" ...
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Benjamin Ludwig's Ginny Moon is both honest and raw. Ludwig gives voice to the voiceless. You might not know that the book is partially inspired by Ludwig's adoption of a teenager with autism, but you should be among the first to get to know Ginny Moon.
