The Plot: Marilyn Hilton's Full Cicada Moon (2015) takes place in 1969 and follows twelve-year-old Mimi Yoshiko Oliver as she moves from Berkeley, California to Hillsborough, Vermont with her mother and father. Mimi faces a multitude of struggles in her new town and at her new school, and most of these dilemmas are centered around the fact that she is biracial: her mother is Japanese and her father is black. In addition to the blatant and covert racism Mimi experiences, she also experiences sexist attitudes from her school administrators and teachers when she expresses interest in taking wood shop class instead of home economics. Beyond these already complex topics, Full Cicada Moon also explores a wide variety of conflicts. Mimi's family has a neighbor who is unfriendly, which the reader later learns has to do with his prejudice toward Japan after serving in WWII as a pilot. Mimi's mother is struggling to adjust to life without her relatives from California nearby. Mimi makes a friend whose mother does not like that she is part-black; this friend later wants to date a "boy with an afro" in their class, which she hides from her racist mother. Mimi wants to be an astronaut when she grows up and is fascinated by the Apollo 11 mission and the moon. She follows her passion and creates a science project about the moon's phases, and just when it seems that her project will win the school science fair, someone vandalizes her work. There are several school dances (where fights occur or where Mimi feels left out), Mimi befriends her rude neighbor's nephew and begins to have romantic feelings for him, and Mimi experiences a variety of racist attitudes and remarks from various townspeople and her schoolmates. This is a lot for one text to take on, which makes sense given the book's 400 pages.The Poetry: While a lot happens in the novel, and the author approaches and successfully tackles some taboo topics, the one thing that was most lacking in Full Cicada Moon was the use of sustained poetic technique. In fact, in 400 pages, there were only a few poems that employed any poetic devices at all. The narrative is told in free verse poems, but the poems lack imagery, lyricism, and music. This lack of poetic technique is acceptable, so long as the author endeavors to utilize the space of the page to create pauses or to draw the reader's attention to linger on a scene. Hilton's verse novel was really more of a soliloquy, where the main focus was on the story and the voice and musings of the speaker (see Mike Cadden's "The Verse Novel and the Question of Genre" for an in-depth discussion of the ways in which the verse novel utilizes dramatic techniques). The one poetic device that Full Cicada Moon does employ every so often is the use of concrete or visual poetry (words arranged on the page to imply movement) and the em-dash (for emphasis and pause at the end of a line).
The Page: Full Cicada Moon is divided into parts that focus on the seasons of the first full year of Mimi's life in Vermont. Several poem titles also emphasize Japanese cultural traditions or follow the phases of the moon. The book includes a glossary of Japanese words, epigraphs from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Neil Armstrong, and an author's acknowledgement page that details how Mimi's narrative came to her and the research she did for the novel.
Overall, the narrative of Full Cicada Moon was interesting, but the book was far too long and filled with too many side-narratives, and the under-utilization of poetic techniques and devices seemed like a missed opportunity. I give Full Cicada Moon three stars.
