Hardcover, 224 pages
Rating: ★★★★
Once in a Town Called Moth is the kind of book you give a teenager if you want to introduce them to Canadian literature.
The premise is interesting enough: a young teenage girl and her father leave their small Mennonite community in Bolivia and settle in Toronto. Why they left is a major thread of the story.
The main character, Ana, is fourteen and just starting high school. After growing up in a reserved and small community, the city - and high school - is a bizarre world she's never before encountered. Ana is a lovely narrator, expressing how she is caught between worlds and emotions with aplomb.
The narrative switches between the present in Toronto and Ana's recollections of Colony Felicidad in Bolivia, which works in more than one way by revealing more of her past as well as containing pieces to the emotional puzzle Ana hopes to solve about her missing mother.
At just over 200 pages, Once in a Town Called Moth is a very quick read with only a small cast of characters and no romance. It's about Ana's struggle with family and identity, which makes it stand apart from a good number of other YA books. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it as a relatively quick intro to the Canlit genre.
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