Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - The Night and Its Moon

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

The Night and Its Moon by Piper C.J.

30 reviews

rberdan's review against another edition

slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

There were definitely elements of the book I liked. Amaris and Nox in the orphanage had a lovely bond. Given how slowly the plot moved we probably could have spent even more time with them there. The relationship between Odrin and Amaris would have been nice to see more of as well.

As much as I tend to be pulled to strong FMCs and was here for the bisexual representation, I have to say I was actually more interested in character development among the

dark fae and the reevers

.

I found myself skimming a lot. I was of course uncomfortable with the various forms of child abuse that took place at the top of the book, and I think it would have been interesting to get into more of the healing that the characters went through. It seemed almost like it was just a thing that happened, and many of the tension points felt a bit more adolescent.

I was also uncomfortable with some of the dynamics between Nox as a racialized character vs Amaris as the whitest of white characters.

Not only did Nox sacrifice herself for Amaris’s safety, but Nox was also consistently pining for Amaris and on a mission to get back to her whereas Amaris had no such yen to serve Nox. While I understand that Amaris would know less of Nox’s fate than vice versa, the power imbalance is still palpable. The dynamic is further underscored by Nox’s story serving under the darkness of Millicent’s operation in a profession that is often demonized while Amaris serves a cause that is positioned as more noble.

All to say I think there were some good ingredients and I did appreciate some of the lore, even if there are critiques around its familiarly. As I’m writing my first book right now I have utmost appreciation for anyone who writes and especially self publishes. I also know how invaluable editing feedback will be because I know I can’t see outside my own focal points. I am curious about where the story goes so may read on, but I have some other reads that I’m a bit more eager to get into right now.

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endangeredhufflepuff's review against another edition

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adventurous dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Kind of difficult for me to get into due to the writing style and typos, but the plot is interesting and unpredictable.

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grets_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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nerdyforbooks_'s review against another edition

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Do yourself a favor and research this book online & don’t just rely on reviews.

I bought this book because of the back. What an AWESOME sounding concept, two fae-touched girls, fighting across the world to reach each other in a war. Cool! I knew nothing about the controversy behind it.

This book is not cool. Let’s start with the fact that in 125 pages I know barely anything about this world. Even though the author tries to make it sound like Nox is highly educated & worldly. Then let’s touch on the fact that tokenism is literally dropped in the first… 20 pages of this book and then the POC MC is whipped for breaking a bottle of oil & bag of flour on page 44. If you can get past those super gross feeling cringe moments, color me shocked because I probably zoned out multiple times just going along from the crap filler.

I was willing to give this book the benefit of the doubt (like OK whipping during medieval times was a form of punishment if we wanna argue that angle - but I don’t even know ANYTHING ABOUT THIS WORLD to say that’s a fair argument), but uhh… all I can say is WTF. Find something better to read.

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iforgotilivedhere's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

I had fun with this. It’s not necessarily the most original fantasy book I’ve read but I still rather enjoyed it. I liked the characters for the most part. I see what Piper CJ is doing with this. SJM did the same with Throne of Glass which is start out slow and unoriginal and then EXPAND. I didn’t see the plot twist with Moirai coming and I didn’t see some of the other twists that Amaris had. I really want to see where this romance is gonna go because there’s so much potential!

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bcrowes11's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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drtx_bwt's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

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morchels's review against another edition

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adventurous dark 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

3.0

This high fantasy is fun and interesting. I'm curious about the characters and I'll probably read the next one. While the story was fun, I think the prose needs a lot of help.

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theemeraldflame's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

0.5

Horrific portrayal of sex work/sex workers. Massive sexism and contradictory worldbuilding (characters are in a world that is female dominated/ruled, where even god herself is female… yet sexism is RAMPANT and major religious and sexual trauma happens to both female characters at the hands of men in positions of authority). Odd, sweeping tone changes throughout. Writing is self-indulgent, metaphor-filled, and at times difficult to parse. Would not recommend to anyone.

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cozykate's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No

0.5

CW: sexual assault, child abuse, racism
This review contains spoilers.

Disclaimer: I read the self-published version with the intention of comparing it to the traditionally published version. I understand the traditionally published version of this book has received additional editing, but it’s my understanding that the majority of the content and story has been left untouched. While I am aware of the drama regarding the author and the editor’s responses to reviews, I will not be taking their actions into account in this review. I will only be discussing the contents of this book. I am a generally picky and critical reader, and aspects of a book that might affect my reading experience might not matter to others. Everyone has different reading tastes. However, as I will address later in this review, there are issues with this book that are not a matter of taste or preference due to their harmful nature.

I’d like to start with things I appreciated about this book. It is obvious that the author was very passionate about this book and put a lot of herself into it. It takes a great deal of courage and vulnerability to do that, which I respect her for. I admire her creativity in blending together and creating her own creatures for this book to give the world a distinct feeling. I appreciate that queer characters were allowed to be queer without any stigma or push-back.

While I had many problems with the technical aspects of this book, I am only going to summarize them so that I can dedicate most of this review to the content.

SENTENCE-LEVEL ERRORS

1. Inconsistent spelling of character names
2. Relatively frequent typos
3. Missing words
4. Punctuation errors
5. Weird or incorrect word choice

Were these distracting at times? Yes. Did they ruin the reading experience? Not particularly. For me, this is an easily fixable issue and is not indicative of the quality of a book or an author’s skill.

PROSE AND DICTION

A significant amount of the sentences in this book were unwieldy and overwritten. I often had to reread to understand what was trying to be conveyed. Additionally, a lot of the language used was not internally consistent. The words that an author uses helps shape the world that the characters inhabit, but the lack of internal consistency in the word choice alone makes the worldbuilding in this book feel a little all over the place. The story does not feel firmly grounded in a particular culture or time as if the author didn’t know what she wanted for the story and just used a little bit of everything without taking the time to logically blend elements together. Part of this was due to the anachronisms littered throughout the book (backpedaling, endorphins, dopamine, shitfaced, clout chaser, etc.) and the use of words that are linked to an assortment of diverse real-world cultures and locations that shouldn’t exist in the book (Amaris’ name is assigned the real-world Hebrew and Spanish meanings; references to pasta, chocolate, tomatoes, lemon, etc.; references to Bodhi, Genesis, and Yggdrasil which are Buddhist, Christian, and Norse Pagan concepts respectively, etc.).

PERSPECTIVE

The book couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be told from an omniscient POV or a third-person limited POV. I lost count of how many times the narration shifted from one character’s perspective to another’s (sometimes within the same paragraph), a character narrates things they shouldn’t be able to see or know, or a character narrates themself in an oddly poetic or unnatural way. Perspective is a useful tool to regulate the information that the reader receives, but it felt like this author wanted the reader to know every single detail. As a result, the narration felt uncontrolled and unintentional in places.

REPETITION AND OVEREXPLANATION

A good 15-20% of this book could have been trimmed down by streamlining the prose. Often, the same idea would be repeated 2 or 3 times with different wording, sometimes in consecutive sentences or paragraphs. Additionally, far too many words were used to describe every single detail or event. For example, “grimy fingers unraveled their grip on her hair and their grip on her arms slackened” could easily be shortened to “they released her hair and arms.” It felt as though the author didn’t have faith in the reader to understand what was happening, and because of this, I felt like I was wading through over-detailed descriptions trying to get to plot.

PACING AND PLOT

The pacing of this book really suffered, in part, due to the needlessly detailed descriptions. For me, the first half of this book was dreadfully slow, and it wasn’t until around the 60% mark that I felt like the characters actually started doing things of their own volition. Up until this point, it feels like characters were doing whatever the plot required of them in order to set up the heart of the story: getting to the bottom of the Raascot curse. I really would have liked to have Raascot and their fae included earlier in the book so that the reevers’ quest to speak with the queen didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. I would have liked to see more of the lessons in the orphanage about the different regions instead of just being told “Nox and Amaris learned about the various regions of the continent.” This would have been an organic way to start setting up the main conflict.

WORLDBUILDING

The worldbuilding, especially with regards to the power structures and religion, felt illogical at times. In this world, the main deity is a goddess, priestesses hold positions of power, and one of the countries has a queen as its ruler. The world establishes a norm in which women would have more power than men. Yet Nox and Amaris continually experience sexism and misogyny throughout the book despite this directly contradicting the worldbuilding the author has done. There is a disconnect between the author trying to empower women and applying real-world misogyny that is historically based in religion. The religion in this book is analogous to Christianity (from what I can tell) which is an institution of power based in the subjugation of women by saying God is a man, God made Eve from Adam, etc. I get the author was trying to critique real-world religion, but it was gone about in a messy way since two key parts of the worldbuilding directly contradict each other.

All of that being said, I understand this is a debut novel, and it shouldn’t be expected that a debut novel has impeccable worldbuilding, pacing, or prose. Writing is an on-going process that requires a lot of practice, time, patience, and reflection. I think the author is struggling to find her own style and voice, but I genuinely hope she continues to write and hone her craft.

Now onto the issues that I had with the content of this book.

PLAGIARISM

While I have only watched the Witcher show and haven’t played the games or read the books, there are too many similarities between Amaris and Ciri for it to be a coincidence. Both are partially-fae, orphaned girls with white hair and voice-related powers who travel with a stranger and his horse (the stranger names all his animals the same thing) to a mountain fortress where she trains to kill demons among a small group of men. Even though their stories go in quite different directions, at their base, Amaris and Ciri feel like the same character. One or two shared traits could have been a reference to Witcher, and while some of these traits are common in the fantasy genre as a whole (such as white hair or having a mentor figure), it is the combination and concurrence of these traits that puts Amaris into plagiarism territory. However, it would have been easy to separate Amaris from Witcher while still paying homage to the series by changing Amaris’ power slightly or making her mentor a woman or having the reevers be more like conservationists who protect the world’s creatures.

TREATMENT OF SEX WORK

Firstly, sex work is work. Like any other profession, sex workers deserve rights, respect, and empathy. This book handles discussions of sex work with little nuance and continues to perpetuate harmful stigmas. TNAIM claims that “at the Selkie, the women were empowered,” but unfortunately, the events of this book do not support this claim. The two named workers that we see, Nox and Emily, were sold to the brothel as teenagers. They are not empowered, because they did not choose sex work as consenting adults. They were sex trafficked. So, our “sex worker” character is not a healthy representation of the industry.

Furthermore, there was a missed opportunity to humanize sex work, sex workers, and clients. All of the clients are depicted negatively with insults to their character, morals, and even appearance. The brothel is described as “a place where men and the blood of their bulges was merely a tool for money” in which “the stupidity of the brutish sex was little more than a weapon for the cunnings of women.” Nox’s labor is also described as “a manipulation of the weak-willed and underserving.” In order for sex work to have the value that it deserves, both sides of the exchange must be respected, supported, and protected. While attempting to uplift the workers, the clients are put down. Yes, sex workers face a disproportionate amount of violence, prejudice, and discrimination compared to other jobs. But by having every interaction with a client portrayed in a negative light, it suggests that this is the expected experience and indirectly normalizes the mistreatment of sex workers, especially by men.

Give sex workers agency. Allow them to enjoy and feel fulfilled in their work. Allow a multitude of clients with various backgrounds and needs. Show the humanity that people are capable of.

TREATMENT OF POC IN GENERAL

The otherization and dehumanization of characters of color throughout the book is frankly disgusting. The majority of the characters of color are literally not human: Nox is a succubus, Ash is half-fae, and Gadriel and Zaccai are fae. The so-called dark fae from Raascot in this book are vaguely brown and under a curse within the borders of Farehold which makes them look like demons and makes their speech unintelligible. The queen of Farehold’s troops kill any Raascot fae who enter Farehold. It should be noted that it is reiterated throughout the book that the population of Farehold is predominantly light-skinned. At the end of the book, it is revealed that the queen cast the curse and has since been enforcing the systematic killings of a group of darker-skinned people who she has literally demonized within her country. This is too similar to the systems of racism against people of color throughout history for looking differently, speaking different languages, and for having different cultures that were deemed “uncivilized” and even “demonic” by white people.

The only human character of color is an unnamed priestess who is described as “onyx as Amaris [is] white.” Unfortunately, this character invokes the Magical Minority trope. This POC character exists solely to help Amaris by imparting vaguely spiritual wisdom and acts as a plot device rather than an actual character. This trope is rooted in racism by subordinating a minority, in this case a black woman, under the guise of empowering that minority. This character is patient, wise, and other-worldly – all seemingly positive attributes – but their sole purpose in the story is to help the white, main character.

NOX, AMARIS, AND THEIR “RELATIONSHIP”

Nox was written incredibly poorly and insensitively. She constantly experiences abuse and trauma and is not given the time or space to process or grieve the injustices done against her. Let’s recount a selection of the horrible things that happen to Nox throughout the story.

1. Nox is named after the color of her skin. ‘Nox’ means ‘night’ in Latin.

2. Seemingly the only child of color at the orphanage, “Matron Agnes had treated [Nox’s] deeply tanned skin tone as a token, parading her around the bishop as a living testimony to the borderless magnanimity of her orphanage.”

3. As a child, Nox is whipped on behalf of the exceptionally white Amaris in order to preserve Amaris’ perfect skin.

4. As a teenager, Nox is sold into sex slavery in place of Amaris and is referred to as a “consolation prize” when the brothel Madame doesn’t get Amaris.

5. Nox is constantly fetishized and sexualized in her descriptions such as “she was just past twenty-one, now with the full-figured body of a woman and the ethereal youth of something a bit more predatory than an angel” or “her lips, her breasts, her hips all seemed fuller now.”

6. The brothel Madame sells Nox’s virginity, and Nox dissociates during her sexual assault. This scene only serves as a plot device to reveal that Nox is a succubus. After her sexual assault, Nox is energized and described as unimaginably attractive and sensual. The brothel Madame then exploits this power to gain political and social power. Let’s repeat that. The woman of color is overly sexualized and is a literal sex demon, and a white woman then exploits her.

7. Nox is sexually assaulted MULTIPLE times throughout the story. On one of these occasions, Nox is comatose. This scene is never brought up again and serves no purpose in the grand scheme of the plot. Why was this even included?

8. Throughout the story, Nox is isolated and does not have any friends. The book itself acknowledges this: “[Nox’s] life had sorely lacked human conversations with women and girls who weren’t her colleagues or employers, or ones who lacked ulterior motives.” Again, this was a choice that the author made.

9. The overall word choice describing Nox is truly uncomfortable. Words such as predatory, manipulative, feral, rabid, personal servant, creature, and more are used.

10. Nox is defined solely based on her appearance. “Nox had but one talent at her disposal. Her succubus power was meant to work in the night.” She does not appear to have any skills, interests, or hobbies outside of her work. Except for dedicating her life to finding Amaris.

Nox is not a character. She does not have agency. She only exists in relation to Amaris, not as her own person: “[Nox] was utterly empty without her starlight. She was a night with no moon.” Throughout the story, Nox constantly thinks of Amaris and how to reunite with her, but Amaris couldn’t care less about Nox. For the majority of the book, Amaris hardly even spares Nox a thought because she has more important things to do. Amaris is actually given agency; she is allowed to have friends, go places, make her own choices, and have other love interests.

Amaris is a reprehensible character. She uses her powers of persuasion to coerce her brother in arms into having sex with her and doesn’t feel guilty about it afterwards. She cannot admit when she makes mistakes or poor decisions. She breaks the trust of her friends by using her powers on them but is forgiven almost immediately afterwards. By the end of the story, she is abusing her power and commanding innocent people to do what she wants (she refuses to wear a dress and controls the emotionally distraught attendant) but “comfort[s] herself that she was in the right.” As the story went on, she became more and more exhausting to read.

Finally, Nox and Amaris’ whole relationship is awkward and disjointed. They start as siblings, but Nox suddenly realizes she has romantic feelings for Amaris. Nox continues to pine after Amaris when they’re separated, and Amaris remembers Nox occasionally and has a random sexy dream about her. Nox actively tries to reunite with Amaris; she almost obsessively compiles information that might help her find Amaris. Yet Amaris, though having agency, doesn’t even attempt to find Nox. So, when the two reunite and share a kiss, it does not feel earned at all because of how one-sided their relationship is. Nox only exists to serve Amaris’ story, and Amaris does not spare a second to be thankful for Nox, recognize her own privilege, or recognize the power imbalance between the two.

TL;DR: this book was not ready for publication. It needed more thorough editing and several more rounds of revisions. While I would like to believe the insensitive content came from a place of ignorance and not hate, I am baffled how it made it past sensitivity readers. I hope the author continues to write but is more careful and conscientious with her work.

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