by Sue Lynn Tan
First sentence” There are many legends about my mother.”
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Content: There is a lot of violence, most of it on-screen. It’s in the science fiction/fantasy section of the bookstore.

I started to type out the plot for this one, but it’s really long and somewhat convoluted. Simply: there is a woman, Xingyin, who is forced to flee her mother’s home on the moon and ends up in the Celestial Kingdom, where she does quests and challenges (and saves the prince’s life a bunch of times while falling in love with him) to have her mother released from her imprisonment on the moon.

This one came really highly recommended, so I wanted to like it. But I just…. didn’t. I grew impatient with Xingyin’s quest after quest after quest after quest. And the love story between her and the prince was just… meh. And then, in part 3, there’s a twist that comes out of freaking nowhere, and I just lost patience.

I did finish it, but I have no interest in reading the sequel. I do wish I could have seen what others saw in it, but it just didn’t work for me.