According to Elizabeth Becker, death doesn’t have to be painful. On the contrary, it can be quite peaceful. Her powerful debut The Moonlight Healers is such a compelling dive into the nuances of life and death, it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.
The Moonlight Healers opens on high school senior Louise as a horrific car accident involving herself and her best friend Peter reveals an inherited healing power, passed from woman to woman for generations. What follows is a journey to discover who she is, what it means to heal, and what it means to truly live. And we learn right alongside her through two timelines and multiple generations of the Winston family. As we discover this new world, the story feels at once intimate and larger-than-life.
With her heartfelt themes, Elizabeth Becker crafted a touching tribute to nurses, and to women everywhere, that had us unable to step away from Louise and her great-grandmother Helene’s world. Whether you love magical realism and history or not, we promise you will have the same page-turning, late-night-reading experience that we did. Let’s talk about why!
Overview
Content Warnings: death, violence
Summary: For generations, the Winston women have possessed the gift to heal. But not every healer has passed on her knowledge. Louise Winston only discovers her abilities when she brings her best friend back from the dead after an accident, and right after he professes his love for her. Desperate for answers and escape, Louise goes to her grandmother’s lush Appalachian orchard. As she uncovers more about her family’s unique legacy, she also learns their abilities can come with a mysterious consequence, and she may have to make an impossible choice.
Feminism Through The Ages
The Moonlight Healers follows two timelines: Louise in present-day Virginia and her great-grandmother Helene in Nazi-occupied France. Though the two women are living in drastically different worlds, their stories are parallels. Thrown into the face of tragedy, they must find their own strength. At its core, this book is grounded in the relationships between women. From mother to daughter, they not only pass the gift of healing, but also the strength and resilience of women. And beyond women, nurses.
The healing touch of a nurse is therapeutic regardless of a magical ability. Taking this reality one step further was a brilliant way to highlight the importance of nurses, and to say thank you. The four women in the Winston family each have a unique relationship with nursing and healing, and the story regards each of them as heroes.
Life And Death
It takes extraordinary strength, both as a writer and as a person, to take a subject such as death and turn it into something so hopeful. And that’s exactly what Elizabeth Becker did. The Moonlight Healers is a story born, as told by Becker herself in a note in the back of the book, out of a need to understand death as something more than a tragedy. So instead of shying away from it, instead of positioning healing as the antithesis of death, she embraces both as two sides of the same coin.
The greatest healing we are capable of is in death, to let a person die with peace, with dignity.
Elizabeth Becker, The Moonlight Healers
With both Louise and Helene’s learned acceptance of death, their journeys also encourage them to live. One can’t exist without the other- the fragility of life, the rightness of death. In each timeline, we watch our characters learn to let go of fear. They chase what they want out of life. And Becker’s exploration of this concept is so profound that it inspires us to do the same. After a life lived to the fullest, death is simply the next step.
Through a bittersweet ending, the stories of four generations of women come together to celebrate love, joy, and sorrow all at once. We’re left feeling fulfilled, and with a renewed sense of purpose. It’s as if we were the ones who had just opened up a door to a new world of magic, possibility, and of course, healing.
Elizabeth Becker weaves a heartfelt story of complex relationships and discovery, and opens our eyes to the quiet wonders of the world of healing.
Preorder Now
The Moonlight Healers by Elizabeth Becker is out February 11, and you can preorder here!
For a debut novel that’s so striking, and so wonderfully written, we can’t recommend this book enough. It might just change the way you look at your life, and might even alleviate some fears about death. Once you’ve had a chance to read it, give us your thoughts at @thehoneypop on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
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