The Stars Beneath Our Feet

I taught middle school English for six years, and I am one of those weird people who loved it. I can relate to the extreme age range swings. You can be having a very detailed conversation with a middle schooler one minute about the money he made mowing lawns and what he is going to do with it, and then the next minute he is trying to bash another kid because she took his toy.

This novel is a Young Adult novel with a 12 year old main character who lives in the St. Nicholas Housing project in Harlem, NY. It is a real place, but the author, David Barclay Moore grew up in a suburb about ten miles from Ferguson, Missouri.

The mixture of childlike and adultlike emotions and behaviors is integral to this novel, and it depicts the reality of kids this age being violently recruited by gangs and having access to guns.

Whenever I read a middle school book, I slip back into my old censor mentality. I taught at an Islamic School which was amazing because kids were allowed to still be kids at that age, and I needed to pick books for them to read that would be Islamically appropriate meaning no cuss words etc. Would I recommend this book for a 7th grader? At first, I ridiculously hesitated, thinking would I want a kid that age to reckon with the main character’s brother getting shot and killed in street violence? It is absurd to think that some kids shouldn’t read about it while others are living it.

The novel does a great job of showing the inner life of characters who are underrepresented in fiction because of racism and classism, and this goes a long way to make readers who have things in common with the characters feel seen and others who may feel more distanced upend the streotypes that are inflicted on these communities.

I figured Moore might be queer because he has five queer characters in this Young Adult novel, and so, come on. The main character’s (Lolly, short for Wallace) mom is in a relationship with a woman and other queer characters make cameos. I particularly like the character of Aston, a lawyer helping the family whose outfit (described in detail) sounds like it was order off of dapperq.

I knew Moore had to be queer when an interviewer asked him in WritersDigest, “Do you have a mirror book? A book that made you feel as if you saw your reflection on the page?” and his answer was A Room with a View by E.M. Forster because he related so much to the protagonist Lucy Honeychurch. I am in love with this answer. I too was obsessed with A Room with a View. When I was nineteen and living in Spain for the semester, my friend and I moved furniture while visiting the Alhambra to take pictures of ourselves standing on things screaming, “Beauty! Joy!!!!!” I know. I know. Wildly priveleged that we got away with this.

Lolly finds himself with access to a nearly unlimited number of Leggos and he and an autistic girl named Rosamund, over time, develop an unlikely friendship by making incredibly huge and imaginative Leggo constructions together as they both struggle to heal from trauma and loss.

I liked the book and would recommend it. Love the title. Saw online that they are supposed to be making a movie out of it to be directed by Michael B. Jordan who played Erik Killmonger in Black Panther.

The news of the movie came out the same year as the publication of the novel, 2017 and there doesn’t really seem to be a peep about it or about David Barclay Moore since then. Makes you wonder. But I hope everything is ok because he is a good writer and the world needs more stories like these. Turns out representation does actually matter.