Winner of the Book Excellence Award for Chick Lit

Life begins at thirty-eight for Long Island mom and writer Luna Lampanelli, when she kicks her secretly gay husband to the curb. She's got her freedom, but what she wants is love.


Luna knows she doesn't need a man to exist, but try telling that to her heart. Against the advice of Sunny, her snarky best friend, and Jiminy, the cautioning voice in Luna's head who just won't shut up, Luna sets course to find a mate.


Luna speed and on-line dates her way into several short-lived, surreal relationships. There's Ari, the humorless Israeli who refuses to assimilate – to America, and to humanity. There's Alex, the young and handsome ex-crackhead who informs Luna he doesn't want to be monogamous—while they're in bed. There's Memphis, the wild-eyed sadomasochist. There's Red, angry and crippled, who becomes the catalyst for Luna to join Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.


But before Luna can proceed to recovery, she meets the elusive but oh so appealing Trip. He's emotionally unavailable and has the Madonna-Whore Complex, but how can Luna (aka "whore") let him go when she enjoys his dry wit so much, and his body even more?


She’d coined the thing they did in her bed “making half-love.” There was no other term that fit the situation.
To make love, both parties needed to keep their eyes open and focused. Luna was too well-acquainted with Trip’s wrinkly eyelids. They looked like elephant skin, except they weren’t grey.
Nor would she concede to tagging it “having sex.” For Luna it was much more than that.
Technically they were “fornicating”—but that conjured thoughts of something gross involving horns, Formica and cats—while the word “intercourse” sounded like a seminar about cross-country highways.
“Making half-love” was the most satisfying label she could summon.


Humorously haunting and packed with unspeakable truths, Luna Rising follows a woman's funny and heart-breaking struggle to relate with un-relatable men and an un-relatable world, and to figure out something even more un-relatable: herself

"Ms.Castrovilla imbues the book with a great deal of pathos and deals with it in much more comprehensive terms than you might find in straight-up romance novels. (The “heat meter” is also lower.) These choices make Luna Rising a novel that has a bigger emotional impact. Instead of chronicling how one finds passion, Ms. Castrovilla illuminates how people negotiate the minefield of love. I suppose it’s easy for two incredibly hot people to fall into bed for a night. This book is much more about how we build deeper feelings and appreciation for the people in our lives, from neglectful parents to our kids and especially the man or woman we love, even if their snoring makes us want to smother them in their sleep sometimes."-Great Writers Steal