Moo: A Novel

“That Zora” is a brief prose piece. Reena introduces Zora, a cow, as a dirty, ornery, selfish, stubborn animal that sometimes knocks people over. Because of her negative qualities, “Nobody wanted anything to do with her” (1).

The book’s second entry is a poem about the experience of living in New York City. Twelve-year-old Reena lives in New York with her mother, father, and seven-year-old brother, Luke. The poem shares both positives and negatives about the city: Museums, zoos, parks, music, and the city’s diversity are positive qualities, while traffic, noise, cockroaches, and rats are negative qualities. Reena narrates from a future time in which the family no longer lives in New York.

In “Flight Path,” which is a mixture of poetry and prose, the family is stuck in New York traffic on a hot day. Reena’s mother and father are recently unemployed because the newspaper they worked for has gone under. Reena’s mother asks whether her father still enjoys reporting, and he says no. She says that this is the “flight path [they are] on” and suggests a move away from the city (6).