Daughters of the Moon; Goddess of the Night by Lynn Ewing
Goddess of the night, the first book in the Daughters of the Moon series, takes place in Los Angeles, California. The book kicks off with Vanessa Cleveland, a teenager, walking home alone at one o’clock in the morning from a club, Planet Bang. She has the dreaded feeling that someone is following her. She hears the footsteps getting closer, making her bolt down the street, yelling a Latin prayer, “
O Mater Luna, Regina nocis, adiuvo me nunc.”…but she doesn’t know Latin. She ends up making it home without getting in too much trouble with her widowed mother. The next morning Vanessa and Catty meet up at a dinner called Jonny Rockets (A.N: an odd name for a dinner, kind of reminds me of Team Rocket from Pokémon when I was a seven). They soon talk about Catty and Vanessa’s abilities. Vanessa can dissolve into micro partials and come back together, although she doesn’t know how to control her ability since she suppresses it as much as she can and pretend to be normal. Catty can time hop, either to the future or past but the most she can do is twenty four hours in either direction. Unlike Vanessa, Catty embraces her ability and practices it all the time. The downside to this is if she repeatedly does time jumps, she makes the day seem slower to the rest of the world and there is the threat that Catty (or/ and whomever she brings with her) may get stuck in Limbo. Catty has only two memories from before she was six, of a crash and of a fire. Her mother had found Catty walking along the road in the dessert with a moon amulet around her neck and found that Catty had special abilities so she decided not to turn Catty into the authorities but to raise her as her own. Vanessa’s mother and father believe that Vanessa s truly theirs because of the fact that her mother was pregnant, went to the hospital and later took baby Vanessa home. One of the nurses had put a moon amulet on baby Vanessa before handing her to the young couple. Unlike Catty, Vanessa does not have any memories before her time with her parents. Vanessa goes on a few dates with a guy, Michael, but somehow Vanessa can just barely keep her molecules together around him and it gets much worse whenever they are kissing or holding hands, causing her to run off in fear off having her molecules come apart and making her invisible piece by piece. Later on that week, Catty turns up missing and Vanessa can’t help but think she had gotten lost in Limbo. Vanessa meets Serena and Jimena who are also daughters of the moon. They all but kidnap Vanessa and take her to their mentor Maggie. There she learns she not only innately knows Latin but ancient Greek as well. It is also revealed that the Atrox, a dark force that can take any shape, wants to kill her and the rest of the Moon Daughters. They already have one so far…Catty. The tale of the Daughters of the moon is also shared by Maggie,
““Maggie smiled. “ When Pandora’s Box was opened, countless evils and sorrows were released into the world. But one last thing to leave the box was hope, the sole comfort for the people during misfortune. Only Selene, the goddess of the moon, saw the demonic creature lurking nearby, sent by the Atrox to devour hope. She took pity on Earth dwellers and gave her Daughters, like guardian angels, to fight the Atrox and perpetuate hope. That is why you are here, Vanessa, to keep hope alive.”
“How?”
“By stopping the Atrox, of course.”
“I’m going to fight the Atrox.”…
“What happens if the Atrox wins?”
“The end of the world as we know it.””
Vanessa rushes home, prepared to tell her mother the truth about herself but decides not to at the very last minute. She sits on the porch and suddenly her molecules are whisked away by the wind, she makes it all the way to Planet Bang were she finally is able to pull her molecules together, landing on the floor, hard. She wakes up to music around her and realizes she’s inside Planet Bang. She bumps into Stanton and she sees the presence of the Atrox in his eyes as well as his friends, they try to grab her but she makes it out of the club only to run into Michael who accuses her of lying and cheating on him with Stanton, giving Vanessa no room to explain what really happened. The next morning, Vanessa woke up to Michael at the front door. He apologized for what he had said the night before, drawing his own conclusion that Vanessa must have been walking around looking for Catty. Vanessa’s mother had overheard their conversation. Apparently she didn’t know her daughter’s friend was missing. (A.N: Weird. You would think she would have heard on the news, the newspaper or even people talking around town?) They decided to take the cars and search for Catty around town; Vanessa with Michael and Vanessa’s mother in her own car. Michael and Vanessa walked the streets of Hollywood and checked the homeless shelters but to no avail. Michael had kissed Vanessa only to have her run away, trying to hide her dissolving arm.
“…I don’t want a girlfriend who runs away from me every time I try to kiss her. All I wanted to do was hold your hand. Maybe you don’t like me the way I like you. It’s okay. We can be friends if that’s all you want.”
That evening Vanessa lets her molecules separate, floating out of her bedroom window, over the city and finally lands near the Hollywood Bowl. There, she catches Stanton watching her from behind. He admits that he is a follower of the Atrox and he has Catty. They make arrangements to meet two hours before dawn next Saturday where Stanton will take her to her. After Stanton vanishes, she finds Morgan on the floor almost paralyzed. ““something’s wrong,” Morgan finally said when she stopped crying, “I feel…so….empty.”” Vanessa takes Morgan to her home where she has Maggie come and help cure Morgan. Vanessa tells Maggie about the arrangement she discussed with Stanton but Maggie makes her promise not to go, for it’s a trap to turn her into a follower of the Atrox. Vanessa agreed but that Saturday, dressed in a goddess like fashion, she leaves with Stanton. Finally they arrived at a warehouse like club but just as Maggie had predicted, it was a trap. Instead of trading her powers in exchange for Catty, the four followers tried to grab Vanessa. She dodged their hands and she managed to grab Catty, making both of their molecules separate and glide toward the exit. Vanessa loses her concentration and they became dense, falling to the ground and carried back to the followers. Serena and Jimena show up and use the moon amulets to direct the strobe lights to their eyes. The four girls rush out of the building and drove to Maggie’s apartment. Instead of being angry at Vanessa for disobeying her orders, Maggie smiled, telling her it had been a test, to see if she was willing to risk everything to do what was right. She had passed. The book ends with Vanessa walking over to Michaels the next evening and explained she has something happening in her life and she might not stop acting the way she has been because that’s just the she is. Michael ends up smiling and asked her if she wants to go to Planet Bang with him Tuesday night. She answers yes quickly and without a second thought. As she walked, the crescent moon raised. She let her molecules separate and flow over the city,
“…She could stay invisible forever. She didn’t completely understand her power, but she was beginning to understand who she was.
Goddess, she thought, and her molecules formed a smile before she rode the breeze with arc-shaped leaps, like a dolphin, up and down towards home.”
Goddess of the Night by Lynn Ewing was definitely a book that held my attention. I could tell this was probably aimed to more of a younger teen group with the simplicity of the story. Ms. Ewing could have put more creativity in how the moon amulets were used and give them a more unique name other than “moon amulet”. I was surprised at the length of the piece. I expected it to be more than 142 pages but it is difficult to tell how long any book is if it’s on an electronic device like my Nook. All in all I would like to read the other books and I would recommend this piece to anyone who like the simplistic portion and does not mind some cheesy words/”actions”. 7/10
~Fiction-Book-Reviewer
