Moon Over Manifest

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-10

Chapters 11-20

Chapters 21-30

Chapters 31-42

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Universals and Preconceived Notions

Prior to her arrival in Manifest, Abilene’s early life is not easy. She is constantly on the move with her father, so she never becomes overly familiar with any place or community. To help her make sense of the world, Abilene divides people, places, and ideas into a system of what she calls universals. These can be viewed as benign stereotypes that often prove true. However, universals viewed through the perspective of a group like the KKK became virulent.

At school, she introduces the concept: “There’s certain things every school’s got, same as any other. Universals, I call them” (26). Abilene assumes that every school has certain types of teachers and certain types of students. She also sees universals in children and adults: “Kids are universals too, in a way. Every school has the ones that think they’re a little better than everybody else and the ones who are a little poorer than everybody else. And somewhere in the mix there’s usually ones that are pretty decent” (26). Her taxonomy also serves as an alarm system and a set of rules to guide her. When she sees an example of unthinking compliance that unsettles her, she thinks about how people who follow without critical thought are people she has spent time trying to avoid.

Universals—or preconceived notions—can be comforting in that they provide a set of neat answers to difficult, unpredictable questions. Universals can show a person who their allies and enemies are. This can manifest as positive bonds between people who share common interests. However, this binary thought can transform to look like racism, judgment, zealotry, xenophobia, or exploitative capitalism.

It doesn’t take Abilene long to reframe her expectations and assumptions, particularly about other people. She thinks, “Maybe the world wasn’t made of universals that could be summed up in neat little packages. Maybe there were just people. People who were tired and hurt and lonely and kind in their own way and their own time” (144). By living alongside the citizens in Manifest, Abilene discovers that everyone experiences pain, suffering, secrets, and guilt. She realizes that these experiences are simply part of human existence and aren’t something she can categorize away to explain the behavior of others.

By the end of the story, Abilene’s set of universals has changed. In some cases, she discards it. The one universal she holds firm throughout relates to the ability of stories to heal, bond, entertain, and link people together as families and communities: “If there is such a thing as a universal—and I wasn’t ready to throw all of mine out the window—it’s that there is power in a story” (144).

Family, Lineage, and Community

Moon Over Manifest illustrates how family, lineage, and community all play vital roles in one’s lived experiences. Abilene starts the novel confused about why her father—her only family—sends her away to Manifest. When she imagines the compass chain stretching far enough to keep them connected, it’s a representation of how much Abilene wants to be with him. However, the compass’s influence is not limited to Gideon and Abilene, as it also links Ned, Shady, and Miss Sadie.

Through Gideon’s departure with Abilene, she comes to realize how her identity has been closely linked with her father. Now that he is no longer by her side, she wonders whether he will ever return, and she wonders who she is without him. Abilene’s struggle to carve out her own individuality reflects her age and the influence her family and community have in her life. While her family has been separated due to her father’s assumption of his cursed existence, the Manifest community steps in to become a found family that provides her with security she has yet to experience. The foundation of this security is rooted in the experiences the immigrants had as they banded together to resist Devlin and improve their working conditions. That the immigrants unite to fight for their role within the mine combined with the fact that Abilene and future generations benefit from their protest illustrates the importance of community across generations.

Family does not always mean immediate safety in the narrative, however. Gideon and Finn’s contentious relationship spawns violence and murder, even though Finn is Gideon’s biological uncle. Gideon spends his teen years avoiding Finn, and when reunited, one of them dies. A disruption of unity also occurs for Miss Sadie and Ned, who are never reunited after she is rejected at Ellis Island and he succumbs to his injuries from war. The narrative communicates that family can be as perilous as it can be comforting and that there is no guarantee for any family at all.

In comparison, lineage is a literal part of a family’s genetic makeup. While Abilene thrives in her newfound family, the shame that Manifest holds regarding its past is tied closely to prejudices about others’ lineage. For example, German citizens experience terror when their community gathering place is targeted during the first World War directly due to German forces an ocean away. Further examples of persecution due to lineage are illustrated through several characters’ conflicts throughout the novel. Ned experiences condescending pity for not knowing more about his family tree from townspeople. At the same time, he is given double shifts at the mine because his lineage does not originate far enough back in the United States to sate the mine owner, who begins discriminatory practices against the immigrants who work within the shafts.

While lineage is a fixed aspect of one’s life, community isn’t. The benefits of community are highlighted throughout Abilene’s time spent in Manifest. She quickly flourishes in her friendships with Lettie and Ruthanne, and she is provided safety by Shady and Hattie Mae. Sister Redempta and Mrs. Evans become a community that shows Abilene how preconceived notions aren’t always helpful, and Miss Sadie illustrates how a community can become an organism of its own through her stories.

By the end of the story, Abilene no longer believes that a shared bloodline is required for people to be family. As she thinks about Miss Sadie’s stories, Abilene reflects, “It was like putting together a big family tree. And even though I wasn’t familiar with the tales they told, I felt like I wasn’t just reading about them” (301). Every character on the tree is family, just as, to some extent, everyone on earth is part of the same family. For Abilene, the Manifest community becomes an inseparable family for her, made up of many lineages that comprise a home.

The Power of Storytelling

When Abilene arrives in Manifest, she doesn’t have any sense of what her story is. After she meets Lettie, she has a more specific vision of why her story is unsatisfying: “It also bothered me that I didn’t have a story. ‘Telling a story ain’t hard,’ Lettie had said. ‘All you need is a beginning, middle, and end’” (246). Abilene scarcely knows how her story begins, she doesn’t understand why she is in the middle of her story, and she has no idea how it could end.

Abilene will be better at storytelling than she realizes. Sister Redempta tells her, “To write a good story, one must watch and listen” (112). Hattie Mae realizes this, and so will Abilene, who eventually begins writing for the newspaper.

Miss Sadie’s broken pot gives Abilene a way to learn what her story is. The stories of Miss Sadie unfold as self-contained anecdotes that merge into a cohesive truth. Each new detail intrigues Abilene, while peeling away layers of the mystery.

The stories Abilene listens to exist as irresistible narratives but also serve to edify and educate her about her father and Manifest. For Abilene, one of her routine uses of the power of storytelling is to generalize about the world, people, and patterns. She refers to the results of these stories as “universals”—things that she accepts as fact. She says, “If there is such a thing as a universal—and I wasn’t ready to throw all of mine out the window—it’s that there is power in a story” (144). Shady also mentions the comfort that stories give when he references a Bible story for Abilene: “The Lord himself knew the power of a good story. How it can reach out and wrap around a person like a warm blanket” (248).

Miss Sadie’s stories reveal the past, although her approach initially confounds Abilene, who wonders, “What kind of purveyor of the future could only tell stories from the past?” (69). Abilene later describes Miss Sadie’s trancelike state when she tells the stories as one removed from the story itself, hovering over it and tending to it as the storyteller. Conversely, Abilene is not detached or removed from Miss Sadie’s stories, even though they are mostly about events she did not experience and people she did not know. However, Miss Sadie’s impactful retellings connect Abilene to the joy, pain, and conflict the townspeople of Manifest felt, allowing her to bond with the town. In trying to pretend that their story could be forgotten, the people of Manifest have become collectively heavy with regret. Ultimately, when the townspeople embrace their story, it frees them from self-judgment and guilt and allows them to start a new story as an optimistic community.