I’ll Watch the Moon

I’ll Watch the Moon

I’ll Watch the Moon takes place in the late 1940s in a Midwest boarding house and deals with one family’s struggle to find faith after World War II.

When polio stalked Minnesota in 1948, fear was every mother’s constant companion. Young Nova Tierney and her older brother, Dewey, live a mostly idyllic life despite sharing living space with a motley assortment of tenants at the boarding house run by their Aunt Dortha and mother, Catherine.

Dewey, nicknamed “Galileo” for his love of astronomy, dreams of some day walking on the moon. He and Nova spend many happy hours looking at the night sky together in their backyard. When Dewey is hospitalized with polio, Nova promises to watch the moon for him until he is well. But will he recover?

In her bitterness over a childhood secret, her late husband’s infidelity and her son’s desperate illness, his mother turns her back on God. Hope begins to return when she strikes up a friendship with boarder and Auschwitz survivor Josef Karski.

Meanwhile, Nova exchanges letters with her brother and dreams of having a father again. She takes comfort in the stars: “as long as the moon was in its place and the stars were burning and the planets were moving through their spheres… everything was all right.” This beautiful story laced with hope, redemption and forgiveness should find wide appeal.

• About the author: Ann Tatlock is the author of the Christy Award-winning novel All the Way Home. She has also won the Midwest Independent Publishers Association “Book of the Year” in fiction for both All the Way Home and I’ll Watch the Moon. Ann lives with her husband and daughter in Asheville, North Carolina.