Product Description

On an early spring night in 1991, Sophie and Crow, flushed with anticipation, slip away from a rowdy high school party and sneak off into the woods. Tonight, for the first time, they will make love. An hour later, Sophie lies unconscious, covered with blood, and Crow is crashing through the underbrush, hurling himself into the river to escape the police. . . .

What was meant to be an idyllic, intimate evening has turned into a nightmare. Despite Crow’s frantic claims of innocence, evidence at the scene suggests his guilt. And Sophie, by now awake in the hospital, refuses to speak, leaving the residents of the couple’s seemingly placid Tennessee town to draw their own wildly varying conclusions.
If Crow isn’t to blame, then who assaulted Sophie, and what compelled Crow to flee? With each answer comes a new set of questions. Elizabeth Cox’s vibrant and lyrical narrative revisits the events leading up to the fateful night, then shows how the tragedy reverberates throughout the community, among parents, friends, teachers, and neighbors–all connected to the young lovers, all with a stake in what happens next. As growing suspicions divide the town, a closer look reveals that everyone has something to hide.

A compelling and passionate page-turner, The Slow Moon waxes full with suspense, a haunting story of innocence lost, lives betrayed, and the courage required to face the truth.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #659310 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-14
• Released on: 2007-08-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Cox's carefully wrought latest (following Familiar Ground) delineates the heartbreaking cruelty that sunders a group of adolescent friends in a small Tennessee town. During a late-night party, high school sweethearts Sophie and Crow go off into the woods. When Crow leaves Sophie for 20 minutes to fetch a condom, she's raped and beaten by a group of boys she will not be able to identify after the trauma. To the shock of the town, Crow, known to be a fine and upstanding young man, is charged with her attack. Cox painstakingly enters the consciousness of the various characters who have a stake in Crow's fate, including his diffident, religious mother, Helen, and adulterous stepfather, Carl; Crow's younger brother, Johnny, who struggles to come to terms with his homosexual attraction for Tom, one of the boys in Crow's band; the judge adjudicating Crow's case, Aurelia Bailey, who has to manage her own troubled teenage boy, Bobbie; and other teens and townsfolk. The fact of Crow's innocence is plain to all, yet no one moves to defend him, not even Sophie, who claims she can't remember what happened. Cox stands back and lets the truth emerge with quiet determination. (Aug. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–In a voice reminiscent of Alice Hoffman's, Cox weaves a story of love, sex, and scandal in a small Southern town. She deals with the issues of rape and infidelity thoughtfully and sensitively. Like people in many small towns, the folks of South Pittsburg, TN, have known one another for too long. They believe that there is nothing new to learn–until Sophie and Rita Chabot move in. Everyone at the local high school has a thing for Sophie. She is beautiful, artistic, and friendly. Rita, her newly widowed mother, is a provocative influence on both the men and their wives at the local hardware store. Change is good until the teen is brutally gang-raped after a party. And so starts a complicated tale of hidden truths, lost love, and enduring spirit. Cox's portrayal of awkward first love carries the novel beyond its dark subject matter, invoking, as does life, both grief and cheer. Told nonlinearly, the story focuses on the characters, leaving readers to try to predict who committed the vicious crime. Teens will be drawn to Sophie, her boyfriend, and the members of his band. Many will recognize, if not themselves, then people they know in real life.–Brigeen Radoicich, Fresno County Office of Education, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Any novel that begins with the rape and beating of a 14-year- old girl will be haunted by the ghost of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. But in the supernatural world of book marketing, that's a curse most publishers would die for. The Slow Moon, a new novel by Elizabeth Cox, contains several significant differences from Sebold's phenomenal 2002 bestseller (for one, there's no spectral narrator), but its insight into the emotional turmoil of teens and their parents in the wake of a terrifying crime should entrance a similar audience.

The story opens on the night that Sophie Chabot, a freshman new to South Pittsburgh, Tenn., and Crow Davenport, her wealthy 16-year-old boyfriend, decide to have sex for the first time. After they sneak away from a wild party at a friend's house and lie down in the woods, Crow realizes that he has left the condom in his car. During the 20 minutes it takes him to sneak back and return, Sophie is gang-raped and beaten unconscious. At the sight of her body, in a moment of panic that will dismay him throughout the novel, Crow runs away, convinced he'll be held responsible if he calls for help.

This gripping first scene pulls us through shifting emotions of romance, excitement, terror and dread. But what's more remarkable is that events over the following months are equally enthralling, even though Cox closes all the natural avenues of suspense: We know from the start that Crow isn't one of the culprits, the police search for Sophie's real assailants never comes into focus, and even the criminal trial breezes by in a few pages. But as Sophie recovers in the hospital, unable to recall anything about her attack, bottled-up tensions and secrets in this small town begin to ferment into an explosive mixture.

I know this sounds a bit overwrought, but except for a few dashes of melodrama ("Something monstrous was moving beneath the skin of the town"), Cox writes in a lyrical voice that gently explains the smothered anguish of these people's lives. She's most insightful when she moves through Crow's buddies, one by one, laying bare their conflicted souls: their desperation to belong, to maintain their parents' love, to score. She catches the animal energy of "these eager boys who thought they were, but were not yet, men." It's a painful process, for the boys and the people around them. "They didn't want to think about the price it took to be men," Cox writes, "wanting instead to be the blaze, the rage, the danger they thought were men."

Bobby, the son of a local judge, sports the charming confidence no girl can resist, even though there's something unsettling about him -- that blink-of-the-eye vacillation between aggression and flattery. If you're the parent of a teenage girl, you need to know about Bobby; your daughter already does. Meanwhile, Lester, the brainiac in the group, is torn between his basic decency and that nagging thirst for his friends' respect, which, unfortunately, is earned by excessive drinking and acquiring good-looking girls.

But that points to a peculiar failure in The Slow Moon: The good-looking girl at the center of this story is eclipsed by the characters around her. Sophie often doesn't seem like someone who's been gang-raped and beaten; she seems more like a girl who's had her bike stolen. For better or worse, the extraordinary openness about sexual trauma over the past few decades has given most of us some sense of the scars left by such abuse and the agonizing path to recovery for those who survive. But Sophie never shows sufficient evidence of the struggle such an ordeal would entail. Her doctor drops little fortune cookies of advice: "He says I need to let myself remember before I can forget." And she adopts a sweet attitude no one could fault: "Each day she rose with a singularity of purpose: to find some small brightness in the day, just one moment, so that she could begin to reenter the world." But there simply isn't enough psychological complexity here to make her convincing. An erotic epiphany in the woods toward the end of the novel -- "The moon was taking off its clothes, making a deal with her" -- sounds particularly false (although it's still better than the ghost-girl sex scene that mars the end of The Lovely Bones).

Cox sees deeper when she looks away from Sophie to the fragile structures of desire and deceit in the community, which for too many of us will be distressingly familiar. Amid disturbing stories in the news, such as the rape case involving Duke University lacrosse players, The Slow Moon is all the more relevant and necessary, a careful map of the fissures that run through seemingly well-built families.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A well-written novel about innocence lost
The Slow Moon is the story of what happens when the small town of South Pittsburg, TN is thrown into turmoil when an act of unspeakable brutality is committed against one of its children. Crow Davenport, 16, and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Sophie Chabot, sneak away from a party to make love when Crow remembers that he forgot his condoms in his car. He leaves Sophie to retrieve them, and in his absence Sophie is raped and assaulted. When he hears police sirens upon returning to the scene, Crow's first instinct is to flee, which he does.

The aftermath of Crow's decision and the harsh reality of what happened to Sophie cause life in South Pittsburg to virtually halt. There is a sea filled with accusations and doubts that flows through the heart of the locals. Some cannot believe that Crow, a priveleged child whose father is one of the most wealthy men in the town, would be capable of assaulting anyone; while others grasp on their need to blame someone and choose Crow as the scapegoat. Though Crow and Sophie are clearly at the forefront of the story, Cox also takes care with her descriptions of the other residents of South Pittsburg so the reader truly understands how invested they are in what happened.

The Slow Moon is more than just a story about a girl who was raped and her boyfriend's efforts to acquit himself of the crime, but a beautifully woven tale about trust and mistrust, doubts and accusations, and the struggle to put back together something that may be irreparably shattered. I picked up this book because my favorite author, Elizabeth Berg, once said that she would buy anything Elizabeth Cox ever wrote. I am now in agreement. This story was beautifully written and told with such poignance and grace that it's hard to find fault with any part of it. I read it in about four hours and if you pick it up, prepare to read it in one sitting. It's that good.

"You are what I wanted, exactly what I wanted"
The centerpiece of Elizabeth Cox's cautionary novel The Slow Moon is a childhood friendship that ends in betrayal and treachery. With spring just beginning, the beautiful copper-coloured moon hovers over South Pittsburgh, Tennessee as two young teenagers, Crow Davenport and his girlfriend Sophie leave a party and walk into the woods toward the river to be alone.

Fuelled by adolescent lust, the two begin to undress, eager to explore each other's bodies. Realizing that he is without condoms, Crow returns to his car, leaving Sophie waiting expectantly by the riverbank. However, upon his return, he discovers that Sophie has been brutally raped and she is now semi-conscious and covered in blood. As the sounds of police sirens are heard, Crow panics, frightened he will be blamed, he races off, leaving his beloved Sophie to her fate.

But it's all too late, as Sophie remembers nothing of the evening, or her attackers, except that she was with Crow that night. With his wallet discovered at the scene of the crime, and blood found on his leg, the evidence is automatically damning. This privileged boy from one of South Pittsburgh's wealthiest families is placed on trial for rape.

In the light of day, Crow continues to maintain his innocence and is supported by Helen, his religious mother and Carl his reserved, detached stepfather. Helen's heart struggles against the idea that Crow might be guilty of something terrible, whilst Crow tries to imagine Sophie and why he felt the need to lie, he remembered kissing her, but over the days she becomes almost "faceless as he remembered."

As consensus amongst the community begins to build that Crow may indeed be innocent, the police begin looking at the possibility more than one person did that this. Findings at the crime scene indicate the evidence of sperm from multiple attackers. Certain boys are questioned, with the feeling that everyone knows more than they are saying and it is determined there were other boys who attended the party that night who were drunk and stoned.

Bobbie, the handsome son of Judge Aurelia Bailey and Crow's childhood best friend was one of the boys at the party. Lately Aurelia has noticed that Bobby has grown secretive and sullen. Could Bobby have raped Sophie? He certainly had a terrible crush on her, after first noticing her when Sophie and her mother Rita moved to South Pittsburgh from Montana with thoughts of new beginnings and of hope.

And what about the enigmatic Tom Canady? A member of Crow and Bobbie's rock band, Tom has developed a crush on Crow's younger brother Johnny, their furtive sexual experimentations taking place over a period of months, the frustration of keeping their affair a secret growing into a steady anger at each other. Over the last few years, Tom has realized who and what he was, creating for himself the burdensome role of an imposter.

Cox conjures up an intricate mix of damaged people, all shouldering their respective secrets and burdens, and having to face the moral dilemmas of living in the modern world. Bobbie's lost father is found, and Crows own father, his real one had been lost. Helen finally realizes that Carl is cheating on her with her sister Ava - she can see it in his body. She has almost confronted him once, but could not imagine what life would be like after such a confrontation.

Carl tries frantically to toughen the bookish Johnny up by encouraging him with outdoor pursuits, whilst Aurelia, although trying as she might, cannot escape her ex-husband's criminal past. The novel is awash in issues of boyhood masculinity, the mysteries of sexual fluidity and the consequences heterosexual infidelity.

These teenagers are assuaging a barely drifting edge of sexuality. Obviously eager, these boys, think they are, but are not yet men, just don't want to think about the price it takes to be men, "wanting instead to blaze, the rage, the danger they think are men."

Sophie eventually returns to Montana to stay with friends, to get away and to perhaps get a new perspective, so that she might help her remember something about that terrible night. It is still impossible to believe that Carl was actually responsible, especially considering his reputation at school, academically and socially, and that he's from a good family - he had never been arrested or even been in trouble.

Cox has written a reflective and quite thought-provoking novel on the dangers of kids growing up in a precarious and uncertain world. These are months of anguish for Carl and for Sophie, who yearns desperately to remember, and when she finally does, the central familiaral relationships of the story are tested to the limit.

Written in a type of confessional, and cautionary tone, The Slow Moon is indeed a deeply haunting journey, where teenagers act shockingly and irresponsibly, but are in the end somewhat trapped and ensnared by the endlessly self-absorbed behavior of those around them. Mike Leonard August 06.

The Aftermath of Rape
Elizabeth Cox is a writer with potential, able to
utilize the beauty and mystery of words and
language.

This is a novel about what happens in the after-
math of rape in a small town. The victim does
not remember what happened and the rest of the
town tries to forget by not attending to any
clues or suspicions.

I look forward to Elizabeth Cox's next novel.