Moriah McStay

Moriah McStay attended Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Two graduate degrees and seven jobs later, she’s finally figured out what she wants to be when she grows up. Now she lives in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband and three daughters. She’s happy with all the choices and chances that brought her there.

Everything That Makes You is her first novel for teens.

Late last month I asked the author about what she was reading. McStay's reply:

As a 2015 YA debut, most of the books I’ve read recently have yet to come out. (Some of my favorites have been The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter and Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli, so keep an eye out for those.)

However, I just enjoyed a leisurely week at the beach, during which I devoured The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. Like most of Mitchell’s books, it’s hard to pinpoint what The Bone Clocks is about. It begins in England in 1984, as fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes runs away from home to live with her much older boyfriend. The first section is told from Holly’s point of view. We see her on and off through the rest of the book, in chapters told through other characters. The final section is once again hers, sixty or so years later.

Like Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks takes significant leaps of time and jumps heads in a way that’s not altogether clear, at first. While I think Cloud Atlas was the better book—pure genius, really—Mitchell performs the same magic with The Bone Clocks, masterfully weaving storylines through at the end. Various themes run through this book—love, classism, have-and-have-nots, mortality and the stretch of time. It’s a dense, beautifully written thing, with just the right amount of strange thrown in. I was happily surprised by some overlapping characters and plot point from two of his other books, Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I have no idea if he planned the connections ahead of time or if they occurred to him while writing, but it’s a great little treat for those who read those prior. Mitchell’s written several other books I haven’t read, and my curiosity has been piqued. I want to know what other little secrets hide in those books.

Visit Moriah McStay's website.

--Marshal Zeringue