Margot and the Moon Landing

Margot and the Moon Landing is about a young girl who loves space. She loves it so much that it’s all she can talk about. She is repeatedly told to pay attention or focus on other things. One morning when she wakes up, she can only recite Neil Armstrong’s speech from the moon landing in 1969. She is frustrated that no one seems to notice that she can’t stop; they treat her like any other day, making her feel isolated. When she gets home from school, she expresses her anger by writing how she’s feeling on the wall in her room. When her mother saw what she had done, she read the words and realized how Margot was feeling. Together, they repaint the wall to cover up the writing and put up paper on the wall so Margot always has a place to write and feel heard.
There are several valuable themes in this book, including listening, communication and forgiveness. The book’s contents cover Margot’s learning to express herself effectively and constructively, and there’s also the lesson for adults in children’s lives – to listen and allow kids to be heard and to meet where they’re at. Margot and the Moon Landing is very well written and effectively conveys a variety of emotions throughout the story.

Medina’s illustrations are beautiful and would be engaging for children. There is a good amount of diversity represented in the book, including Margot and her mother as well as Margot’s classmates who represent a wide variety of cultures and ethnicities. The wall that Margot writes on has a few sentences that might need to be discussed with children in order to understand the lesson of the story, that being that we need to express ourselves constructively. It is understandable that, in an emotional moment, Margot would write without a filter; however, the end of the wall-writing reads, “Everything is dumb!! I HATE THIS! School is boring”. Though this wording makes sense within the story, without some discussion it could be misinterpreted by young children.