Sages Book Club Wrap Up: The Last of the Moon Girls by Barbara Davis
If there’s one thread that kept surfacing for me through The Last of the Moon Girls, it’s softening. Letting your heart crack back open after it’s been hurt, instead of sealing it shut for good and calling that strength. It sounds simple written out like that. In practice? Not so much. I’ve spent a lot of years proving exactly how not simple it is.
For most of my twenties and into my thirties, I handled being hurt by someone by clocking out. I’d find out they lied to me, and that was it. No conversation, no “can we talk about this,” no closure text explaining why I was leaving. You were just gone, blocked, deleted, removed from my life with the efficiency of someone closing a tab they never meant to open. I told myself this was healthy boundaries. I was protecting my peace. Looking back, I wasn’t doing that at all. I was hardening, and calling it wisdom.
If you’ve made it to the end of the book, and since you’re here, I’m guessing you have, you watched Lizzy do something pretty similar. When the town turned on her family, she didn’t just protect herself, she sealed herself off completely. Walls up, doors locked, the whole production. She left town the moment she was able to and didn’t come back for years. Honestly, fair. The town was genuinely cruel to her. Sometimes hardening is the only thing that gets you through a season, and leaving is sometimes the only way to survive it.
But it was coming home, learning from Evvie, spending real time with Andrew, sitting with her mother again, that slowly cracked something open in her. Not because anyone forced it. Because she let it. She started to believe that maybe not every disappointment needs a permanent wall built around it, and that people, even ones who hurt you, can earn their way back through showing up differently.
That’s the part I’m clearly still in the middle of learning myself. Cutting someone off completely isn’t always the wrong move. Sometimes it’s exactly the right one. But I’ve started wondering how many people I shut out for good who maybe deserved a conversation instead of silence, and how many relationships I ended permanently over something that, with a little time and a little grace, might have actually been different the second time around.
Here at Aletheia, we talk constantly about truth, which is literally what the word means, but staying open doesn’t mean ignoring the truth of how someone treated you. It means asking a harder, more honest question. Is this person actually unsafe, or am I just scared? Those are two very different things, and only one of them actually requires a wall.
Lizzy didn’t let her guard down for everyone. She let it down for the people who kept showing up, who were patient with her, who gave her room to come back to herself slowly. That’s discernment, not naivety. There’s a real difference between staying open and staying exposed, and most of us, myself included, could stand to get a little better at telling them apart.
Thank you for reading this one with me, Sages. The Last of the Moon Girls asked us some uncomfortable questions about safety, trust, and what we do with the people who hurt us, and I don’t think any of us walk away with clean answers. That’s kind of the point.
So tell me, what message or thread are you walking away with from this book? Respond in the comments, I’d genuinely love to know what stuck with you.
With you in all of it,
Kristin