Two Mini-Reviews of Books Perihelion Did Not Like

FIRST REVIEW: Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan

It's got a pretty cover. That's about the only nice thing I can say about it.

This book started off with a bang, and by “bang” I mean a comma splice on page one. Similar grammatical errors appeared throughout. Even beyond the poor editing the writing was pedestrian at best. If I encountered an excerpt of this book online, instead of published and on my library app, I would have assumed it was ripped from a 15-year-old's Wattpad novel. Half of the words written on the page are describing clothes, furniture, etc. Yet somehow they don't paint any picture whatsoever. The dialogue is stilted and juvenile. It gets especially bad when the MC meets the prince because the author attempts Witty Banter but neither character has any personality to speak of and is frankly lacking in the wits department so much of it is downright nonsensical.

Something that really bothered me right from the start is that this book is supposed to be about the daughter of Chang’e. It’s CALLED “Daughter of the moon goddess.” But there’s nothing at all about the relationship between the goddess and her daughter. They live on the moon for a few pages, the mom is like Whuh oh you’ve been discovered! And then the daughter escapes on a cloud and falls off and lands on earth. Ok. Why do I care. I don’t! Because the characters have nothing to them. They’re flatter than cardboard. They’re less than one-dimensional. It’s beyond their capabilities to have compelling relationships with other characters. I get a very strong sense that this is one of those books where the author is not thinking of it as a book--she is picturing it as a movie or a TV show as she writes, because that is what she really wants it to be, but writing is "easier" and so she's made it a book instead. This author is, unfortunately, not alone in this. It's becoming increasingly common in fantasy. Especially YA. And it makes for godawful reading. I do not want to read books where the author's main influences were movies and television. I want to read books where I can tell the author also reads. (And I don't mean fanfiction. I mean BOOKS!)

SECOND REVIEW: A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee

This book’s prose quality is slightly better than Daughter of the Moon Goddess, but not by much. There are fewer glaring grammatical errors, at least. But it had a weird stylistic thing where it would repeat phrases (i.e. “dilapidated bridge,” “lugubrious priests” [that was the weirdest one]) over and over, like it was trying for a fairytale vibe. It didn’t land. The inclusion of footnotes was another bizarre stylistic choice, and inconsistent with the attempt at fairytale language.

As a result, a potentially interesting story was reduced to simply……Boring. I read the first 5 chapters, then flipped to the end and read the last two to see the resolution, and I did not feel like I missed anything at all.