Reviews with content warning for Blood - Water moon

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

Water moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao

79 reviews

novellearts's review against another edition

3.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

drpthy's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous dark emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

kaneebli's review against another edition

2.5

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

i was pretty disappointed with this book. it's not a bad book, but the blurb summary makes it sound like it's gonna be a whimsical adventure, but it's actually very bleak and grim and creepy. there's nothing wrong with books that are bleak, grim, and creepy, but it's just not what i was prepared for.

also, the romance felt pretty forced. keishin is almost immediately ready to make a huge sacrifice for hana and i really don't understand why. it feels very much like: factual logical science guy gets enchanted by gloomy mysterious girl and they fall in love over the course of a few days and a few life threatening situations. it's just unconvincing.

also, i really didn't connect with the main characters at all. i really just didn't care very much what was going to happen to them throughout the story. i just felt that they weren't very likeable for some reason.

the climax was pretty good, and the writing was interesting and it did make me want to read more, but it just wasn't what i expected i guess

Content Warnings

thebookishmutant's review against another edition

3.5

emotional hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Water Moon was a good stab at magical realism; it had some beautiful elements that had me enraptured, but not for long enough. Its fundamental issue is that it wanted to do too much but didn’t have the space to do it. What we have here, messy as it was, at least read well and presented some moments of lovely, whimsical magical realism.

While this novel had some issues throughout with thematic cohesiveness, I do think that the central one (or the one that felt like it was supposed to be central, at least), was a beautiful one—connectivity through the choices we make. Hana’s life is dictated by regret, but she learns, through jumping through fantastical worlds, that it’s the unexpected things in life that bring us together that make life worth living. I especially loved the connection to the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Detector, something that Keishin has returned to Japan to study—capturing the secrets of this elusive, subatomic particle that can only be observed (if you’re lucky) in an observatory filled with distilled water underground. I’m a sucker for when writers are able to articulate that emotion with science, especially with something as misunderstood as physics; Water Moon did a lovely job of using that as part of the larger metaphor about how lucky we are to experience the unexpected, and how that can bring us together. I just wished Yambao had done more with it, but what we had, I loved.

I also loved the worldbuilding in Water Moon! I don’t think the childlike wonder that Yambao was going for was properly executed all the way, but I love the inherent whimsy that’s integral to holding the worldbuilding together. You travel to these parallel, unseeable worlds found in puddles on the ground, and in those worlds, you find everything from villages dedicated to hanging the stars at night and origami and paper planes with a life of their own. Even with the rather sinister undercurrent that runs through it, the glimpses of the fantasy worlds were almost dreamlike. They had a distinct quality of feeling like the kinds of fantasies you imagined when you were a kid (especially the puddle travel), which enhanced the feel of the world overall.

However, that whimsy only came off in varying degrees. That was due to the writing, which often came off rather rote. Yambao presented the reader with a myriad of fantastical, objectively wondrous elements in this parallel world that Hana and Keishin venture into, only to describe it in the flattest terms. For a magical realism novel, the writing felt almost utilitarian, designed to describe a setting or a phenomenon with the absolute minimum amount of description for the reader to get an idea of what it looked like. Sure, Water Moon didn’t need to be excessively flowery or purple in its prose, but when you have a setting as whimsical and magical as this, more description is necessary.

The same applies to the feelings of the characters—they hardly seemed to react to their settings, only serving to be chess pieces that were dragged around at will when the plot called for it. Keishin at least had something of a personality, but other than him, most of the characters, including Hana, were defined only by what had happened to them. They were defined only by their backstories, and that dictated everything that they did throughout the story—not their motivations or their personalities. All of this, combined with Yambao’s relatively flat writing, made their romance lackluster. Not only did it feel like the classic “oh, our main characters are a boy and a girl, therefore they have to fall in love,” it was just so rushed and un-earned—we didn’t get nearly enough development (or page time) from either of them to merit a full-blown romance. Even though they’d jumped through magical puddles together and visited whimsical worlds, I found myself barely caring for either of them, or their romance.

Back to the subject of themes…I wholly believe that a book shouldn’t be constrained by talking only about one theme. In fact, most every book does that anyway—having a book centered around a single theme without even a handful of sub-themes or topics is practically impossible. Like I (and Yambao) said, everything is connected. Water Moon, however, had a problem with articulating it. Beyond the bit about choices and connectivity, Water Moon wanted to say so much about so many things—motherhood, grief, regret, parent-child relationships—and yet it didn’t know what to say about any of them. A theme was introduced with the same emotional weight as the central theme, it got 50 pages of page time, and then it barely resolved itself. Water Moon had almost no sense of direction, leaving me with a book that didn’t resolve itself in a satisfying or logical way. Ultimately, this felt like a case of too many cooks in the kitchen—it was an ambitious attempt to tackle every theme and give it the same weight, but it ended up in a plot (and characters) that ran around confused for almost all 374 pages and underbaked statements on what it wanted to say.

Overall, an ambitious and dreamlike novel with a world that was a treat to explore, but offered up flat characters and had no sense of what it wanted to do with itself. 3.5 stars!

Content Warnings

leannanecdote's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

kaiyakaiyo's review against another edition

2.0

adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

this was really underwhelming.

the world-building had a lot of potential, but was so poorly organized that it just felt like a bunch of pretty locations cobbled together. this is the second time in a few months that I’ve compared a book’s world building to a Coraline-style other mother universe, complete with the eerie white space between the fleshed out parts.

the characters were sweet, but I didn’t find myself very invested in them, or really understanding their motives without a lot of telling vs showing. The haphazard narrative and constant timeline switches & flashbacks & imagination sequences didn’t help.

i think this could have been a really pretty limited animated series, but in written form it felt simultaneously too episodic and incoherent

Content Warnings

foldingthepage_kayleigh's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous emotional lighthearted reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Just a magical, philosophical meander through a beautiful world straight out of a Studio Ghibli movie. That being said, I felt the ending was way too rushed. And the characters were lacking some robustness. Overall, a soft, gentle story perfect for my bedtime reading.

Content Warnings

yilliun's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This felt like reading a book created by Studio Ghibli. Magical.

Content Warnings

12ptfont's review against another edition

2.75

adventurous sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

notnaomie's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous emotional mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Firstly, the book jacket and then the book itself is absolutely gorgeous. I am so happy I saw it at the bookstore and I was able to buy it! The world building was wonderful to imagine. I thoroughly enjoyed this book from the moment I started it to the moment I finished it. I definitely could have finished this book a lot sooner if I didn't have to work (lol).

Content Warnings

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