Last Moon Dancing:A Memoir of Love and Real Life

Last Moon Dancing: A Memoir of Love and Real Life is a book by Monique Maria Schmidt.

   When I first read the praise for Last Moon Dancing, my expectations were set high. The storyline of a Peace Corpsvolunteer trying to make a change in the world by teaching English in a poor village in Benin sounded intriguing. However, after having finished the book, I felt a bit let down, as the book was more about the author, Monique Maria Schmidt, just trying to live through her two year stay in Glazoue, a poor village in Benin, than actually trying to help the villagers. That being said, I feel that this is a decent book overall, but I felt that the author could have done a better job fine tuning it.

The first chapters of the book were the parts I enjoyed the most. Schmidt painted the setting very well, giving an image of a poor Beninese village with a rundown school, with students who rode to school on rusted bikes and brought machetes to school. I received a glimpse into the poor village of Glazoue, where owning a moped is a luxury and there is no access to running water or electricity (Schmidt 7). It gave me a clear image of what she experienced during her time at Glazoue and how life was like for her and her students. I could imagine how hard it would be for a volunteer from the United States to make the transition to the alien world of this small, backwater village, and how hard a struggle it would be to survive there. Schmidt’s narrating style is rather unique. Instead of writing in the style of a typical nonfiction book, she adds her own poems and letters to her friends throughout the text. This gives the book more of a personal feel, and helped me better understand who Schmidt was. The interjection of amusing letters that she wrote gave me a few laughs, and showed that her sense of humor helped her get through the tough times in the village. She writes:

Dear Editor: In your September Cosmo, you had an article entitled “24 Ways to Feel Sexy.” As part of the 24, your article listed 1. Don’t wear pantyhose. 2. Turn off the lights and use only candles. 3. Wear loose, flowing clothes. I would like to tell you that those three suggestions make up my daily life, and I feel about as sexy as Jabba the Hut. Might I suggest you do further research and give your readers other ways to feel sexy because your current suggestions do not work. Thank you. Sincerely, Monique Maria Schmidt (Schmidt 102)

   However, sometimes her peculiar way of writing got in the way of telling the story. After a while, her poems that popped up every few pages became an annoyance, and as a reader I was tempted to just skip these passages altogether. This was because many of these poems did not seem to have a connection whatever she was writing about at the time, and it felt like they were just haphazardly scattered around the text. The placement of the poems took my focus away from the text, and made it hard for me to concentrate on the original idea that she was writing about. Another reason I was disappointed by this book was that the focus of her writing wasn’t really on her students that she taught English to. In fact, she gives the impression that she did not manage to teach the children much at all, and that after two years of English class, the students could not even use the word “start” correctly and that the village would have preferred that “the Peace Corps had gotten them a [water] pump” (Schmidt 217).
   Another flaw in the book was the lack of character development. While you get to know Schmidt well, you don’t get a feel for the other characters, like Big Mama, her students, or even Beaker, her best friend while in the Peace Corps. Taking Big Mama as an example, she is the mother in Monique’s host family. However, Schmidt does not elaborate on her relationship and interactions with her, even though she is a big part of the author’s life in Glazoue. Throughout the book, I had little information on Big Mama, and most of the dialogue between them was just to show the cultural differences that the villagers and Schmidt faced when interacting. In fact, for the first chapter or so, it was not even clear who Big Mama was. Only after rereading it did I actually figure out that she was part of Schmidt’s host family. The other characters are like this as well, none of them really pop out as unique people, and Schmidt doesn’t give readers enough information to get to know any of the people besides herself.
   Another thing that disappointed me is that Schmidt focused her writing more on her struggles in every day life to survive, rather than on her and trying to teach English to her students. She barely even talks about her experiences with the children, even though this was the reason she was sent to the village by the Peace Corps in the first place. The lack of depth that was put into developing the students’ characters made it hard for me to make a connection with them. In fact, Schmidt doesn’t seem to know much about any of her students, from her writing. The children seem to see her less of a teacher than a foreigner to make fun of and taunt. This is displayed when she asks them if a river running through the village is shallow enough to cross with a bike, and they lie to her to make her get drenched in the neck high water (Schmidt 130). 
   Overall, I did not really enjoy this book. However, this is mainly just because the book did not turn out to be what I expected. I expected a book about an inspirational story of a young American you tries to teach a group of impoverished young Africans, has to overcome many obstacles in the process, but eventually succeeds. In other words, a story fit for a Hollywood film production. What I got instead was a raw, personal account of a Peace Corps volunteer who had no idea what she was getting into when she signed up to go to Benin, and her story of just trying to get through the two years that she spends in the village, learning more about herself in the process. Last Moon Dancing is a decent story of one woman and her struggle to survive in a completely foreign culture, that is, if you aren’t looking for a perfect Hollywood ending.