The Moon Is Down - John Steinbeck

This might be a meandering review, sorry in advance! 

This year I signed up for Dracula Daily, which is this super fun free service that emails you the pertinent chapter(s) from Bram Stoker's Dracula on the day in which they take place in the novel. While this is indeed a really awesome thing that I am really enjoying, I decided that I wanted to just skip ahead and read the whole book, so I went searching in the library. I didn't find any alleged vampires, but in STE I stumbled on this thin book, and since I hadn't heard of it before and like John Steinbeck, I picked it up. 

This book was written in the early 40s about a town that is occupied by an invading force, which we are meant to think of as Nazis, although they are not specifically identified as such. Since we have literal Nazis stomping through American streets these days, which is simultaneously mind-boggling, disgusting, and infuriating, and there are many Americans who seem to desperately want a fascist theocracy to destroy any kind of human rights or freedoms for 90% of Americans (women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, people who aren't "Christians," etc.), I figured this was a timely read. 

And so it was. In my opinion the main takeaway was that resistance is paramount. The occupied people must keep some kind of hope and do what they can to resist, even if it's just rebuffing the invaders on a personal level. They will most likely outnumber the invaders, who are far from home and susceptible to human weakness. People can do small things, like consistently disrupting the enemy supply chain, that make a difference. This is a small book in size but I can see why it was printed in secret and smuggled widely during World War II. Highly recommended. 

And PLEASE, PLEASE, if you are American, vote this fall and in every election. People have fought and died so that all of us could vote. Many of us wouldn't have been able to vote in the (relatively recent) past, so we owe it to ourselves to exercise this hard-won right to do what we can to keep the forces of evil at bay.