From the Moon
I Watched Her

Emily English Medley’s heartbreaking novel From the Moon I Watched Her is filled with secrets and lies both about family and God. […] Medley presents complicated family relationships—mother-daughter ones, father-daughter ones, and those between spouses—well, exploring the motivations and histories behind each with revealing details. […] The coming-of-age novel From the Moon I Watched Her suggests that family bonds are stronger than the secrets that threaten to pull them apart.

From The Moon I Watched Her is a powerful, compelling, horrifying, disturbing, cruel, and beautiful book. Medley forced me to look inside and see through the fresh, wounded, and tender young eyes of Stephanie Walters as she tries to build a life on solid ground but is continuously destabilized by her shaky world.

In describing Stephanie’s trauma of being isolated from healthy, adult human connection in her broken culture, Medley’s work reveals the way the vulnerable are forsaken for the reputation, pleasure, and comfort of those in power. The author’s juxtaposition of incredibly beautiful spiritual experiences with horrific portrayals of religious and sexual abuse were especially haunting.

Medley describes a horizon . . . a place where one can’t really distinguish boundaries at the hazy meeting of reality and unreality.

The voice of this book is astonishing, engaging, and real. Emily English Medley captures the heartbreaking innocence and sturdy hope of a growing child as she desperately tries to believe in her parents and in the ‘parents’ of her Church—who try to blind themselves with a similar willful hope. As they cling to the hope that would prevent them from questioning the structure of their lives, they depend on that to hope to cover their illness and their secrets, but as ever, it is always the children who pay.

From The Moon I Watched Her is the riveting coming-of age-story of a girl from the deep South raised within the Church of Christ. The book dives into the implicit and explicit messages, and pervasive roots of religious control, oppression, and abuse towards women in the south. From the first page, the author instantaneously transports you to the mind, perspective, and vivid inner world of young Stephanie Walters. As she navigates her youth and teen years, Stephanie overcomes sexual trauma and loss. Her story educates and informs on the profound impact of mental illness on family dynamics and the development of identity over time.

In our current climate of hyper-partisanship, this book gives insight on how someone’s perspective can become so hardened it seems impossible to change.

Medley has created a page-turning adventure where the reader is never sure who are the heroes and who are the villains. The characters inhabit a world of oil rigs, Texas heat, and the repressive nature of their church—yet they fit together like puzzle pieces, each affecting the others, sometimes by happenstance and sometimes by choice.

This book is a powerful work of fiction that makes you wonder how much of it might be based in reality. Once I started it, I flew through it and couldn’t put it down.

From the Moon I Watched Her is an achingly beautiful, brutal, coming-of-age struggle about a young girl’s yearning for truth, love, and loyalty as her family and faith rip apart.

Against the honky-tonk landscape of 1970s small-town Texas, Medley artfully and brazenly exposes the evils of religion, the tragedy of mental illness, and the cruelty we humans do while exploring a troubled mother-daughter relationship amid a family in crisis. But the ferocity of the human heart, Medley reminds us, can survive a multitude of sins if we immerse ourselves in the cleansing waters of truth and reality instead of lies and myth. Packed with sin, secrets, and sex, this book rubs your senses raw a dozen different ways and then offers hope and healing. Just like real life.