Amber McBride's Me (Moth) (2021) is a young-adult verse novel about Moth, a teenage girl who struggles with the grief of losing her family in a car crash. When Moth meets a boy named Sani, the two instantly connect through their shared pain and rich heritage, unaware that their paths were destined to cross.
At sixteen, Moth is the sole survivor of a car accident that claims the lives of her parents and brother. Moth relocates to a Virginia suburb to live with her alcoholic aunt. A social outcast at school, Moth is pleased to meet Sani, a half-Navajo, half-white teenager from New Mexico. As the two get to know each other, Moth discusses how she learned Hoodoo rituals and spell casting from her grandfather, who was once friends with a Navajo healer. When Sani gets fed up with his stepfather's abuse, he takes Moth on a roadtrip to his father's home on the Navajo Nation reservation. Sani's father doesn't acknowledge Moth's presence while insisting that Sani take the herbal pills he gives him. Sani is inconsistent in his pill-taking, refusing on the grounds that he cannot see things as clearly when he takes medication. At the novel's climax, Sani's father, who cannot see Moth, realizes that his son has been dealing with a ghost. Sani's father explains that Moth's grandfather cast a spell ensuring that Sani would guide Moth to the afterlife; in exchange, she would show Sani how to live. After this revelation, Sani and Moth profess their love for each other before Moth sprouts wings and flutters to the afterlife to join her ancestors.
Published in 2021, Me (Moth) explores themes of grief, isolation, abandonment, ritual, healing from trauma, and transformation. Narrated in the first person by Moth, the novel's protagonist, Me (Moth) presents an example of unreliable narration, as Moth does not know she is dead until the story's climax. The book was a 2021 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.
