GINNY MOON

Told in an extraordinary and wholly unique voice that will candidly take you into the mind of a curious and deeply human character. For the first time in her life, Ginny Moon has found her forever home -- a place where she'll be safe and protected, with a family that will love and nurture her. It's exactly the kind of home that all foster kids are hoping for. So why is this 14-year-old so desperate to get kidnapped by her abusive, drug-addict birth mother, Gloria, and return to a grim existence of hiding under the kitchen sink to avoid the authorities and her mother's violent boyfriends? While Ginny is pretty much your average teenager -- she plays the flute in the school band, has weekly basketball practice and studies Robert Frost poems for English class -- she is autistic. And so what's important to Ginny includes starting every day with exactly nine grapes for breakfast, Michael Jackson, bacon-pineapple pizza and, most of all, getting back to Gloria so she can take care of her baby doll. GINNY MOON is a compulsively readable and touching novel about being an outsider trying to find a place to belong and making sense of a world that just doesn't seem to add up. Ginny Moon is a brilliant debut. In asking us to identify with a developmentally delayed, autistic teenage girl and her peculiar obsession, Ben Ludwig set himself an Olympic degree of difficulty, but he succeeds with the extraordinary Ginny Moon. I was unable to put the book down as I willed her to overcome the obstacles within and around her. Ben Ludwig is a fine observer of human dynamics, and his sometimes dark sense of humor means that the emotional journey, challenging as it is, never becomes wearing. I was mightily impressed--this novel has all the elements for critical and popular success! --Graeme Simsion, New York Times bestselling author of The Rosie Project

About Benjamin Ludwig