“I wanted a place where kids feel welcome,” says Michelle Smith (SHA’11), owner of Moon and Back Bookstore.

Books

At This Bookstore, Children Lead the Way

Michelle Smith (SHA’11) owns a West Medford, Mass., shop organized by how children choose books

At Moon and Back Bookstore in West Medford, Mass., a child looking for a book about a truck doesn’t need to know the author’s name or ask an adult where to find it.

That’s because the shelves are arranged the way young readers would search: by dinosaurs, ocean life, “royal and magical” stories, and whatever else has caught their attention that week.

Michelle Smith (SHA’11), a mother of two boys, opened Moon and Back in February 2025, after noticing that her city was filled with young families, but had no bookstores built around how children choose books.

“I wanted a place where kids feel welcome, where kids can learn to love reading because they can find stuff that’s exciting to them,” Smith says. “My kids went through phases where they liked trucks, and they just wanted a book with trucks in it. They didn’t care if it was a funny story or nonfiction [or] who wrote it or if it was new or old. They just wanted trucks.”

The arrangement of books in her store is about more than convenience, she says. She wanted children to feel the shop was built for them.

“I had this experience as a stay-at-home mom, where I didn’t feel like my kids were welcome in a lot of places,” Smith says. “I really wanted this place to be, ‘You’re welcome here. You belong here. And you can learn here.’”

To reinforce that message, she’s placed a bubble tube lamp with fake fish near the front of the store. “There’s something about this bubble tank that has fish in it that’s very calming for kids,” Smith says. “A lot of kids come in and they don’t know where they are. They’re a little hesitant to be here, but then they see it and they’re like, ‘All right, I’m good.’”

Smith did not come to bookselling through publishing. She transferred to BU after earning an associate’s degree in culinary school, graduating from the School of Hospitality Administration in 2011. After BU, she worked in purchasing at the Hyatt in Cambridge, an experience she says later made the idea of running a bookstore feel less far-fetched.

“I had all that experience purchasing food and beverage for a huge hotel,” Smith says. “And then, when I had started to think about the bookstore, I was like, well, books don’t go bad. Food goes bad.”

The comparison helped her see bookselling as a kind of purchasing and inventory challenge she already understood, even if the product was different. But Smith says she also saw Moon and Back through the lens of hospitality: “It’s making people feel welcome.”

Opening the bookstore was a family decision, even if Smith was the one driving it. Brian, her husband, watched her turn the idea into real planning and late-night work.

“Every night it felt like I had the TV on watching nonsense and Michelle had spreadsheets going,” he says. “She was doing what I would consider the hard work of it.”

He says that when he fills in at the store, he often sees children move through the space with a confidence they might not have elsewhere. Regulars know where to find the books they love, he says, whether the subject is trucks, dinosaurs, or unicorns.

“This is a place where kids are not just tolerated, but celebrated,” he says.

The Smiths’ younger son even had a hand in naming the store. When she asked him, “Do you know how much I love you?” he would answer, “Moon and back.”

A little more than a year in, Smith says the store is still finding its footing, but the response has reassured her that Medford has room for it. She has had only one day without in-store sales, she says. But, even then, some customers had placed special orders, which they usually pay for when they pick up the books.

“One of the bookstores in New York told me when I opened, ‘My goal was no zero-dollar days,’” Smith says. “I was like, ‘Wow, the bar is so low.’ But I’ve had one zero-dollar day since we opened, and I don’t know if it even counts.”

She is thinking about what comes next for Moon and Back, but is cautious about expanding faster than her family or the business can handle. For now, Smith says, she is trying to build Moon and Back without losing sight of why she opened it in the first place.

“That’s going to be the next plan for me, to be able to extend our hours either later at night or Sundays without me,” Smith says. “I knew with young kids and my capacity, I wasn’t going to try to do it all at once. My boys are very important to me. I can’t risk burnout from the beginning.”