HEAR OUR INTERVIEW WITH NOVELIST MOLLIE MOON, AUTHOR OF FIVE WISHES

By Miriam Raftery, East County Magazine

May 20, 2017 (San Diego) – Mollie Moon, author of the novel Five Wishes,  sat down for an exclusive interview with Reina Menasche, host of the Bookshelf segment on East County Magazine’s Show on KNSJ radio.  Hear the full interview by clicking the audio link eand read highlights below.

Her novel tracks the journey of a teen girl escaping a shanty town in Honduras in hopes of finding a better life in America .  Her journey includes living on  city streets and falling prey to a human trafficker, nightmares that befall far too many immigrants coming to America. A German immigrant, Moon has empathy with immigrants around the world in today’s political climate.

“I came from a country that had finished a war. Everything was destroyed,” she recalls.  “Later in the ‘60s, the Soviet Union built a wall segregating East Germany from the rest of the country with wired fences and a minefield…As a child I saw the towers and the guards with machine guns and it was very frightening to me.”

Living in Germany, Moon met people from neighboring countries and throughout her life, has experienced a variety of cultures.  “When you get to know people from a different culture, you open your heart, “ she says. “You learn compassion.”

Moon attained her own dream of obtaining a college education in America, but faced her own set of challenges in life.  She’s also traveled to Brazil, where she saw third world conditions and people eating food from garbage cans, sights that increased her empathy with the plight of impoverished people. 

“ I read a lot about Syrian immigrants going to German and African immigrants going to France,” she says.  “Everybody wants to live in happiness and peace, not in poverty.”  That universal dream, and the efforts to attain it, is a global problem today.

Since writing her novel, she has become involved in efforts to combat human trafficking locally, where it has become prevalent in some San Diego neighborhoods.  

She is now writing a sequel to Five Wishes that will be titled Seaside Daisies that will show the future or her protagonist, Maria Elena Garcia.

Like many immigrants, the fictional Maria’s dreams of a brighter future began as a teenager, when her family refused to let her finish high school in order to go to college – a theme that resonates with Moon.

Moon’s advice to immigrants everywhere?  “Don’t ever give up.”