A review by phifalling
The Sun and Moon beneath the Stars by K. Parr

2.0

This book was June's Sapphic Book Club read by @sapphicliterature.

So, firstly, I liked the writing style of this. It had a good balance of "easy to read quickly and comprehend" while not feeling too juvenile and pulling me out of the book much. The characters are mostly compelling, the main plot and its various threads and mysteries are interesting, and I really loved the theme of redemption and forgiveness and moving past our sins, no matter how atrocious. Overall, I really enjoyed this book... which raises the question of why I only gave it 2 stars.

The more mundane issue the book has is lore- specifically, it has a lot of it that goes completely unexplained, and while this story already has lots of lore explanations to serve the main plot, the actual setting and society and how it influences the characters feels sort of unfinished. Like you can tell reading it that the author probably has a deep intricate idea of all the races and their history and relationship to each other, but it's not really on the page. You know the trope where the characters explain commonplace knowledge in their world because the audience doesn't actually know it? This book is what happens when you write like people who actually just take those things for granted and as realistic as it is it's also frustrating.

This is specifically an issue with the real big problem I have with the book, which is the Fantasy Racism. Now, fantasy racism is iffy to begin with, but I will point out this isn't just elves and humans with some parallels to irl racism done poorly. Oh no, this is human races (in a world where non sentient humans are also a thing), one of which is light skinned and the other of which is dark skinned... and the dark skinned race is discriminated against by the pale race (the main character is a literal slave like this could not be more blatent). And I genuinely believe the author meant to make this a proper portrayal with how racism is bad and even when it's normalized the supposed reasons aren't actually right, but they sort of... don't do that. There's one conversation where a character mentions that the pale people stole the land from the darker people and the white blonde princess disputes that, saying they "won it fairly in a war"?! But the conversation is interrupted after this and they never mention this again. Also it's another pale person bringing this up, and none of the characters of color ever complain about or hold the white people accountable for the racism (the romance is between the previously mentioned slave, and the white princess who once had her whipped when they were both children, and this is only brought up in terms of the former slave worrying the princess will hate her, and the princess feeling sad when she finally remembers the horrible thing she did). For most of the book the races are referred to as being enemies, and the obvious oppressor/oppressed dynamic is never labeled or examined in any meaningful way. We get the sense we're missing either a piece of lore or history that "explains" the racism through some past misdeed on part of the oppressed group (this is problematic enough when done to justify racism against green skin, but in this context would be horrifying) or a lot of character development for the princess actually coming to terms with how wrong and harmful the society she was raised in is. At the end her and her lover plan to go together to rebuild the kingdom in which her lover was formerly a slave, and they both seem happy with this so you assume they must have talked about what changes they'll make to it, but we as the reader... never see any of this. Honestly I was originally going to give this book 3 stars because of how much I enjoyed the plot but actually thinking through the entirety of the race issues to write this review has made me drop it to 2.