Where
Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
Summary: Minli lives with her family on the Fruitless Mountain and, even though she
knows why the stories say the mountain is so barren, after hearing another
story from her father and on the advice of a goldfish she goes off to see the Old Man on the Moon and ask him herself.
The
Good: I liked how the story was able to incorporate a
half dozen other stories told by the characters into itself and create a
history and a precedence for what Minli is doing that way. I have no idea how
closely any of these stories resemble real Chinese fairy tales but they have
the same feeling, the same kind of stories and storytelling, that “real” fairy
tales I’ve read had and that’s not the easiest style of story to recreate.
The
Bad: Since the story is middle grade it was a little
too simplistic for my taste, that combined with the fact that it’s a quest
means that Minli rarely faced true adversary or hardship and I do wish the
story had thrown in a little more of that (even though I do prefer quest type stories to "defeat the evil lord" kinds of stories and liked how no villain suddenly appeared at the end for Minli to vanquish). But, since a middle grade book
doesn’t need to be the most complex thing out there, nothing really does and
when your readers are 11 this is doubly true, this isn’t a terrible thing and
with the story’s quick pacing this also would have been hard to pull off.
I’m giving this one a 3.5 out of 5 for being a rather solid book, even if it wasn’t
precisely what I wanted, and would easily recommend it to any middle grade
reader who wanted something fantasy to read.
