Like most/all of Oyeyemi’s work, Peaces has the cadence and tenor of a fairytale. We are introduced to characters, certainly: Otto and Xavier Shin, who have received as a not-wedding gift this train journey; their mongoose, Arpad; the train’s proprietor, Ava, and her protectors, Laura and Allegra, and her mongoose, Chela. But the standard book questions like “why are these characters the way they are?” and “what motivates their choices?” are not questions that appear to interest Helen Oyeyemi. Instead, her stories ask fairy tale questions along the lines of “Can we ever awaken from the dream that is reality?” and “Do we even want to?”

Peaces begins with a matter-of-fact weirdness that put me in mind of Susanna Clarke, particularly her newest (!) novel, Piranesi. At first the weirdness is charming and sweet, along the lines of the fact that Otto Shin has a pet mongoose named Arpad, and Arpad is the latest descendant of a series of family mongooses, also named Arpad. Charming! Sweet! The book gives the impression that the world is just like this, and we won’t get anywhere by making a fuss about it, so we might as well get on with it. But of course, this isn’t our, the reader’s, world. But it’s all so matter-of-fact, the way Helen Oyeyemi writes it, that you start to wonder if maybe this is the world and we’ve just been mistaken about it all along.

But then! It gets so creepy! Peaces goes on a journey from “this is weird but fine” to “this is a bit creepy actually” to me curled up in my comfy armchair in my comfy library whisper-screaming AAAAAAAAAA. I admit that the closing creepiness is of a type that causes me a particular terror: When listening to The Magnus Archives, my true most terrifying of the fears was The Slaughter, but The Stranger was a close second. Peaces pings pretty close to several of the Fears/Entities, in case that is your jam.

Ever since Boy Snow Bird, I have been an anxious detective of whether Helen Oyeyemi hates trans people. (The ending of Boy Snow Bird, in case you have forgotten it, has a trans character who’s trans due to trauma, and the narrative suggests that he needs to be saved from his trans-ness.) Peaces contains a new clue!

The romantic failures are a sore spot. That’s a field in which I really ought not underwhelm. When Martha and Lieselotte had me, Martha’s legal name was still Mark, and Lieselotte was a high court judge in Bern. They’re two of the freest people I know, and somehow that seems like a by-product of the rambling conversation they’ve been in ever since they met, an exchange that draws them down by-lanes of trivia and scholarship, pettiness and poetry. When some new pact clicks into place, they meet at its corner to kiss. My professor mum made her Martha-ness official, and my Bern high court judge mum stepped down and stripped her view of justice all the way down to grass roots, serving her god (and I really do think justice is a god for Lieselotte) as a police inspector who does her paperwork whilst sipping coffee out of a mug emblazoned with a picture of her wife and son. I hate that mug. The picture on it makes us look like IKEA models who might just get thrown in as freebies if you buy enough furniture. But catalog elements aside, it’s a photo in which Martha is full-on sultry professor, and I look like a cute baby Viking. So even if her current mug gets broken, or hidden, Lieselotte just pulls out another, identical one.

Pros: Clear affirmation of the trans person’s identity. Cons: Unnecessary use of deadname. Conclusion: I don’t think she hates trans people, but this is still a clumsy and ignorant way to speak about a trans woman. So…. much better than Boy Snow Bird? But still not the best.

Note: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted my review.

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Just absolutely everything about Miel and Sam’s relationship made me happy. I love it that McLemore lets them have sex YOU KNOW AS TEENS DO SOMETIMES and they aren’t punished for it. I love it that even though they are clearly devoted to each other throughout the book, they also mess things up with each other and have to apologize and figure things out with each other afterward. I love that they’re desperately attracted to each other (yay for depicting passion in queer relationships!) and sometimes that’s good and easy, and sometimes it makes already-complicated issues more complicated.

The truth slid over her skin, that if she loved him, sometimes it would mean doing nothing. It would mean being still. It would mean saying nothing, but standing close enough so he would know she was there, that she was staying.

And I love that they get a happy ending. Queer kids deserve happy endings.

What else, let’s see. Oh, I loved it that the antagonists of the book, four nearly identical white sisters who have ruled the town all their lives and are trying to keep that situation going, are still clearly the protagonists of their own stories. I got anxious around the midpoint that the Bonner girls were being set up as Bad Femininity to contrast against Miel’s Good Femininity, which is a trope I could not be more tired of, but the climax of the book reclaims enough interiority for all the Bonners to satisfy my greedy heart.

It’s interesting — When the Moon Was Ours is not, as I’ve said, my type of book. I prefer a book that bothers less about lush prose and more about thrilling adventures and robot pals perhaps; less magic realism and more straight-ahead magic with really specific rules and nefarious power struggles perhaps. But I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to have a book like this in my hands and know that it’s available to teenagers, to let them know a little bit more about the possibilities the world offers.

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