Twelve Moons: The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you’ll read

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I really felt the love and dedication the person shares for their children and family unit which was really lovely, but I really wanted some kind of resolution for the author or a more clear personal growth story but it just never arrived. It is clear from her writing that Giles is a very anxious and often deeply unhappy person, and whether it was her intention or not, this element of her character held centre stage throughout the narrative. Having to battle systems not adequately equipped with knowledge, finances and sometimes just basic empathy felt all too familiar.

However, I believe it says that by the time the book even began, they had been separated for four years. Descriptions of the natural world permeate the novel, charting the ebbs and flows of the family’s life across a whole year. A newly single mom and her 4 daughters (including one with specific needs) navigate their small town lifestyle with lots of nature hikes, singing, occasional quarantines, and ocean swimming. It is here they can be truly themselves; the book felt just as much a love letter to the natural landscape as it did to her daughters.The main elements that stood out to me were Giles' expert capturing of the wild magic of Northumberland, the cosy domesticity of her everyday life, and the deep love she has for her daughters. Despite articulating trepidation and uncertainty and doubt, her bravery and tenacity shine from the page as does her deep love for her children.

I shared this book with a good friend, a mum like me whose everyday mothering strays from the conventional. Each word is chosen with care to vividly portray the landscapes, and to express the varying emotions experienced by the author. An exquisitely and bravely written memoir following the lives of a single mother and her four beautiful daughters, during a year of the pandemic. Giles also struggles with the latter and her writing is honest, sad and funny as what must be an exhausting and draining life is explored. Giles examines and processes how the course of her life’s events have led to her current situation: ‘how I have ended up on my own in the Northern most corner of England with four little girls, when I spent my childhood dreaming of bright lights and centre stage?Written with intelligence - a blend of lightness, elegance, and even the elegiac, Twelve Moons immerses you in the Northumbrian landscape, with excursions to other quiet places. Overall the novel felt to be a contemplation of motherhood and the fierce love between a mother and her daughters. No woman should be so defined by her relationship with a man that four years later, she still can't bear to think of him. This memoir of Caro Giles is written in such a tone that you can't help but fall in love with her family, the moon and the landscapes of Northumberland.

She evokes the lives of her 4 amazing daughters, The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One with honesty, compassion and clarity. A passage in which the author describes having to de-register one of her children from school by the age of six was particularly emotive and hard-hitting.The trauma of navigating a separation as well as school systems unable to meet her children’s needs felt overwhelming and her honesty with regards to how this impacted her sense of self was something that was identifiable, ‘How can my story be excavated from the mine of my life when so much is devoted to others? Sometimes the use of candles and their mystical power is a bit too much, but this mother's fortitude is incredible. How important it was to find that familiar glow, sometimes in amongst deep cloud, sometimes a bright summer night sky.

empathy for the author's struggles, understanding as a fellow mother of four , a shared love of wild places; her descriptions are utterly magical. I have both the audiobook and the print, as it's one of those beautiful reads that you just want to absorb into yourself in every possible medium. The chapters lead us through the year’s moons and their phases, which unites things cleverly - an unexpectedly grounding device.Would highly recommend reading over the course of a year, which I had done so up until a holiday in Northumberland which felt the right setting to finish the book. Twelve Moons is one of those stories a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone. I hadn’t thought to look for it, to decide to make time for it, to recognise it in a world that is so busy. Yet we see, she is gravity to the four girls in orbit around her, her own anxiety waxing and waning over the months, as the landscape around them and the turn of the seasons become her refuge. It also lead to the uncomfortable realisation that I compare my own mothering with others far more than I should, my own always coming up short.