The Slow Moon

May 22, 2006
Cox's carefully wrought latest (following Familiar Ground
) delineates the heartbreaking cruelty that sunders a group of adolescent friends in a small Tennessee town. During a late-night party, high school sweethearts Sophie and Crow go off into the woods. When Crow leaves Sophie for 20 minutes to fetch a condom, she's raped and beaten by a group of boys she will not be able to identify after the trauma. To the shock of the town, Crow, known to be a fine and upstanding young man, is charged with her attack. Cox painstakingly enters the consciousness of the various characters who have a stake in Crow's fate, including his diffident, religious mother, Helen, and adulterous stepfather, Carl; Crow's younger brother, Johnny, who struggles to come to terms with his homosexual attraction for Tom, one of the boys in Crow's band; the judge adjudicating Crow's case, Aurelia Bailey, who has to manage her own troubled teenage boy, Bobbie; and other teens and townsfolk. The fact of Crow's innocence is plain to all, yet no one moves to defend him, not even Sophie, who claims she can't remember what happened. Cox stands back and lets the truth emerge with quiet determination.

December 1, 2006
Adult/High School-In a voice reminiscent of Alice Hoffman's, Cox weaves a story of love, sex, and scandal in a small Southern town. She deals with the issues of rape and infidelity thoughtfully and sensitively. Like people in many small towns, the folks of South Pittsburg, TN, have known one another for too long. They believe that there is nothing new to learnuntil Sophie and Rita Chabot move in. Everyone at the local high school has a thing for Sophie. She is beautiful, artistic, and friendly. Rita, her newly widowed mother, is a provocative influence on both the men and their wives at the local hardware store. Change is good until the teen is brutally gang-raped after a party. And so starts a complicated tale of hidden truths, lost love, and enduring spirit. Cox's portrayal of awkward first love carries the novel beyond its dark subject matter, invoking, as does life, both grief and cheer. Told nonlinearly, the story focuses on the characters, leaving readers to try to predict who committed the vicious crime. Teens will be drawn to Sophie, her boyfriend, and the members of his band. Many will recognize, if not themselves, then people they know in real life."Brigeen Radoicich, Fresno County Office of Education, CA"

Copyright 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2006
In a small town in Tennessee, Sophie Chabot is the new girl in town, beautiful and with the added allure of having a French Canadian father, a forest ranger who died on the job in Glacier Park, Montana. Several of the town's young men are interested, but Sophie is attracted to Crow, a guitarist in a local rock band and a member of the town's most prominent family. After a raucous party, Sophie is sexually attacked in the woods and so badly beaten she is shocked into amnesia. Crow's arrest as a suspect sets the town to discussing the likelihood of his guilt or innocence, provoking suspicion of others, and revealing underlying fault lines in a number of relationships that seem solid on the surface. Cox shifts back and forward in time to tell of how newcomers make their home in an insular town and innocence is lost as painful secrets are revealed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)