Moon Water

Moon Water by Pam Webber 280 pages

I didn’t know this novel was a follow-up to author Webber’s “The Wiregrass,” until I looked up the page count. Doesn’t matter, while it may be a follow-up novel, this is a true stand-alone.

It’s the summer of ’69 in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Lots of changes are happening in the country, but they don’t seem to touch these small mountain towns. Sixteen-year-old best friends Nettie and Win have a “project” to complete. Win’s grandmother, Nibi, is a Monacan Indian medicine woman. She knows “the darkness” is coming, hard times, but she cannot put her finger on what will happen. In order to prepare the girls for the event, she teaches them how to build a dreamcatcher. Nibi warns them that it won’t be easy—it will be journey that will shape the girls’ lives.

It wasn’t easy mining for the amethyst for the middle of the dreamcatcher, killing a dear in order to get the sinew, searching for golden eagle and white owl feathers and digging for arrowheads. These scenes bring in the setting as a character, which becomes important in the last third of the novel.

Other than the dreamcatcher, Nettie’s summer plans include trying to figure out her relationship with her longtime boyfriend Andy, even though they have broken up. Andy seems to be dating by her arch-nemesis, Anne.  And more than anything, Nettie wants to get baptized in the local Baptist church, but her doubts, and the fact that she voices them, stops the local preacher from baptizing her. The preacher has turned Nettie’s doubts over to the assistant preacher, which creates a “darkness” of its own.

Then the darkness arrives, seemingly out of the blue. The only ones prepared are Nibi and, somewhat, the girls, and Again, setting place an important part of the story in the tragedy that unfolds. I would love to say more, but I don’t want to give it away.

I really enjoyed learning about Nibi’s life as a medicine woman and life in the mountains. “Moon Water ” receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.