Dear Mothman

Lovely. Explorations of grief and identity; perspective of trans, queer and autistic experience from an own voices author. Cryptid metaphor regarding othering of queer and transgender people accessibly conveyed for middle grade readers. Sketchy art style of Rebecca Harry's illustrations have such a life and sweetness to them. 

Gotta say, I struggled as an adult reading children engaging in risky behaviour, even in a narrative with that tone of ‘of course everything will turn out alright'. Took me a bit to get on board with an expansion in the perspectives offered. You spend a larger portion of the book only reading from Noah's POV, as he writes to Mothman and about his daily life, so that addition of Hannah, while it makes sense, felt a little jarring. 

And while I'm humbugging, I have to say I'd describe this as an epistolary novel. I've heard it described as a novel in verse and I don't know enough about the parameters to be the arbitrator for whether this fits the definition, but I'm biased toward a certain structure in poems, even if they don't rhyme, and besides paragraph break formatting, that was not in evidence here.