Water Moon Review

With comparisons drawn to Studio Ghibli Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao is a book I really expected to enjoy more and I was upset that it didn’t quite hit the mark for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it or that it was a bad book – it certainly wasn’t – but let’s get into why I came out of it a little disappointed.

 - Title : Water Moon
 - Author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
 - Genre : Fantasy

Hana is a young woman who has just inherited her fathers pawn shop where people from the non magical world come to get rid of their regrets. It only appears to those who need to find it and anyone else would find a completely ordinary ramen restaurant in its place. However Hana’s first morning in charge of the shop gets off to a rocky start as she wakes to find the shop ransacked as well as her father and one of the all important pawned regrets missing. Now joined by Keishin, a scientist and potential customer of the pawn shop, Hana has to figure out what happened to her father and bring him and the missing choice back to the shop. And she must accomplish this before the Shiikuin, creatures who collect the regrets from the pawn shop and keep order in the magical world, return to the shop in three days.

Now to me this book had a lot of cool creative ideas that felt like they were straight out of a Studio Ghibli movie and I loved them. The parallel world that Yambao imagined can seem like it’s filled with whimsy and magic but also has a very dark and quite scary side to it. I would love to spend time learning all about this world and the places within it. It was definitely the main draw of the novel for me as I love plots where someone from a non magical background is thrown into a fantastical new world so we get to learn about this world along with them. However I didn’t feel that I really had the time to fully appreciate it as the characters jumped from one setting to another almost every chapter. The plot of the novel does have a time pressure present as the characters are being chased throughout by the Shiikuin so perhaps the rushed feeling was intentional on the authors part but it didn’t work for me. I would have by far preferred to spend a bit more time with each new setting or concept and have them feel a bit more fleshed out even if that meant cutting some of them completely.

There were interesting characters throughout though unfortunately I feel like our main two Hana and Keishin were a little flat at times so I was more interested in every other character in the novel than the two I was meant to be the most invested in. Their romance did come about quite fast but I don’t think that could really be avoided with how short of a time period this was set in so I’m not upset about that but those who hate the instalove type trope may not be a fan.

Yambao writes beautifully and that really shows when she’s describing her fantasy world. Her descriptions really let the reader imagine the places the characters are exploring so clearly and they were one of the best parts of the book for me. On the other hand I do think she seems to struggle with making speech sound natural at times as it can come across quite stilted and I think that is one of the reasons the main two characters seemed quite flat and one dimensional. Don’t get me wrong you do sometimes also get some very beautiful and thoughtful pieces of dialogue as well but that didn’t happen as frequently.

Overall if you want really creative concepts in a fast paced magical realism fantasy world this might be a good pick for you but if you need really in depth world building to go along with it this might be a bit lacking. I’m still glad I read it but for me this would have benefitted from either being longer so as to fully explore and flesh things out or from removing some ideas and focusing on developing what was left more.