Over the past weekend, I watched author Amy Tan’s Netflix Documentary: Unintended Memoir.  The documentary focused on the family relationships (especially with her mother) that helped form her art. I had read none of Amy Tan’s books before and the documentary gave me insight into how she became the writer that is beloved by readers worldwide. As a result, there were two books of her work I want to read and the children’s book, The Moon Lady, was on the first on the list.

A grandmother tells her three granddaughters the story of getting lost as a seven-year-old on a boat celebrating a moon festival for her first time. Her adventures and connection to the Moon Lady capture her granddaughter’s imaginations and they learn about the importance of how the shadow side of their personalities will come out and how dreams can come true if they are truly authentic desires.

The artwork by Gretchen Shields is colorful and captures the essence of the story. The Moon Lady provides a lesson in how children can understand their true natures and don’t have to suppress the hidden side of their personalities. That is a valuable lesson for adults as well.

The Moon Lady is an excellent palate cleanser of a read after two heavy books like the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. Tan’s book celebrates the importance of storytelling and how both children and adults can feed from it to enrich their souls.   I’m looking forward to reading the Kitchen God’s Wife as my first Tan novel and hope she has the same spirit in that book as The Moon Lady.