Twelve Moons: The most beautiful and inspiring memoir you’ll read

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Caro Giles lives on the far edge of the country, with her tribe of daughters: The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One.

TWELVE MOONS follows the lunar calendar, each chapter sharing a month and a moon, and shows the simmering power that lies in our often hidden daily lives. This is a debut memoir that will particularly resonate with anyone who has had their life smashed apart and needed to dig deep, just to keep going. In it, she records the daily simple acts of mothering her four girls, The Mermaid, The Whirlwind, The Caulbearer and The Littlest One, fierce and wild, against a backdrop of lockdowns and loneliness.

Unfortunately the more personal side of the book fell really flat on me and I just felt really sad that the person spent their life escaping from perceived pressure, anxiety and mental strain.

Inwardly tearing myself down even as I'm feeling solidarity and awe for another woman's strength and resilience. Each word is chosen with care to vividly portray the landscapes, and to express the varying emotions experienced by the author. In fact, the calm and chaos of their lives mirror the ebb and flow of the tides and the lunar cycle beautifully.

Five stars are not enough for this amazingly powerful book: how mental health of children, the author's own health following recent divorce unravels their lives inn the time of covid.

Every now and again I will be stopped in my tracks by a full moon, crisply white against the night sky, sometimes so big it inspires awe before I quickly get on with what it was I was doing. The chapters lead us through the year’s moons and their phases, which unites things cleverly - an unexpectedly grounding device. Descriptions of the natural world permeate the novel, charting the ebbs and flows of the family’s life across a whole year. Caro’s world revolves around caring for her eldest, who is autistic and recovering from an illness which has temporarily robbed her of the use of her legs.I understand that the purpose of the book was for Giles to explore who she was in the wake of her separation. Over the course of the year, the moon becomes her fellow traveller through dark times, and companion through joyful ones and even when the sky is wreathed in cloud, the moon is still felt in the pull of the tides.

Bound by circumstance, financial constraints, illness and the challenges of single motherhood, she has nowhere to go but the fierce landscape that surrounds her. It is here they can be truly themselves; the book felt just as much a love letter to the natural landscape as it did to her daughters. I actually moved away from the North East in the middle of reading this, and found myself so racked with homesickness for the wild coastlines of Northumberland, that I ended up putting it down for five months before I had the strength to pick it up again. Written with intelligence - a blend of lightness, elegance, and even the elegiac, Twelve Moons immerses you in the Northumbrian landscape, with excursions to other quiet places. No woman should be so defined by her relationship with a man that four years later, she still can't bear to think of him.In Caro Giles’s case that’s the reality of divorce and the everyday needs of her tribe of four daughters. It was a gentle, moving and beautifully written account of a woman and mother on the margins, by virtue of the familial circumstances in which she found herself. Relief found in nature through wild swimming and the observations of both the year I nature as well as the comings and goings of the moon. Yet we see, she is gravity to the four girls in orbit around her, her own anxiety waxing and waning over the months, as the landscape around them and the turn of the seasons become her refuge. Twelve Moons is one of those stories – a book about finding yourself, your voice and a sense that even in the dark of the night, we are never truly alone.