Betsy Byers, The Moon and I
Simon & Schuster, 1991
Biography, Snake Stories
Ages 9-12
Betsy Byars is an author and one day she is sitting on her porch at her log cabin reading over what she had just written. She, for no real reason, looked up into the rafters of the porch and there was a black snake coiled around a beam. Very quickly she becomes attached to the snake, quite protective over it. That day she continually checks to see if the snake is still there, and each time the snake is till lazily laying around on the beam. All of the sudden Betsy gets caught up in what she is writing and spends a few hours without checking on the snake.. To her dismay, the snake is gone when she finally looks for him again.
When Betsy was little she always dreamed of growing up and working in a zoo and keeping all the baby animals. She and her best friend, Wilma, would play zoo in her Betsy's backyard. One day while they were out looking for more animals to add to their "zoo" they found a nest of eggs under a woodpile. They decided that they would each take two eggs and leave the rest in the nest. So they each picked up two eggs and put them in their mayo jars. She described the eggs as elastic and tough, nothing like a hen's egg, they were almond white and smooth. Almost as soon as Wilma got home her sister told her mom that she had put the eggs in their sock drawer and her mom flushed them down the toilet.
A week later Betsy's egg started to hatch, it took a whole day until it had finally hatched. It turned out to be a bull snake and she had to let it go, since it is posionus.
While later when Betsy was back at her cabin working she ran outside to try and find the snake, by this point she had named it Moon, she finally found it. Moon was backup against a corner by the neighbors cat, Betsy yelled at the cat and she went running home. Moon was still a little shaken up by the encounter with the cat, he finally got over it and slithered away. She did not see Moon for another little while.
Finally one day she saw Moon on the back porch. The dog went walking by and scared Moon off the porch. He left a third of his body still on the porch and Betsy went to touch his tail. She had a desire to know what he felt like. Well Moon did not like the fact that she did this so he struck at her, he only got her hand once but struck three different times.
Three weeks later she saw Moon again and followed him into the woods. While she and her husband were trying to find him, they realized that he was right under her feet. Her husband and her managed to pick him up but both Betsy and Moon freaked out. After only a few minutes she dropped him and Moon hurried away.
One day on her way to the cabin she saw a blacksnake dead in the road, stopped and picked it up and put it in a paper bag in her backseat. While she was driving she started to hear the crinkle of the bag moving and freaked out, with good reason. She pulled over to the side of the road because she was scared that if the snake got out of the bag and touched her leg it would cause her to get in a wreck. A man stopped to help her and they determined that the snake was dead so he dumped it in the ditch and went on his way.
Betsy hadn't seen Moon in a month until one day her husband told her that he was lying out in the driveway enjoying the sun. She went out to watch him, he did not mind being watch as long as she stood still. That same day a little boy came up to her door and tried to sell her a black snake he had caught. She ended up buying it from him for $10 but then set the snake free.
A while later she went shopping for her dog's birthday and found a snake that was for sale in the pet store. She knew right then and there that she was going to buy it, and she did. She was so excited since she has wanted a snake since she was 7 years old. A dream come true
I just randomly stumbled up this book in the library one day, I had never heard of her and thought it might be an interesting read. The book turned out to be alright, not one of my favorites for sure but not terrible by any means. It was basically just a biography that did not really flow together very well. She had some funny little anticdotes about her childhood included which made it quite entertaining! I would not suggest this book, per say, but it could be used it doing projects on biographies. Aside from that there really is not much to say about this book, not much to it either.
