A review by crybabybea
When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker

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

1.0

This book is a great light entertainment romantasy in the same vein as ACOTAR or Fourth Wing. I, however, feel duped because it was being sold as a high fantasy with romance and incredible world-building. If you love love love fleshed out fantasy, political strife, and detailed magic systems, you probably will not like this book. It falls apart once you look at it too closely. Fun for what it is but I have to rate it low because it's not what I look for in a fantasy. If I were rating this just solely as a romantasy I still wouldn't rate it very high. I felt ACOTAR was even written better than this which is a very low bar.

 I wrote a 3,000 word essay for how much this disappointed me, so here are the bullet points: 

  • Shallow world-building. There are cool, unique things that happen but they serve no purpose for the world (such as the dragons turning into moons). 
    • World building is lazy and the author relies on you reading a 20 page glossary to understand rather than fleshing out the world herself
  • Dragons are part of the world but don't serve any purpose beyond transportation.
  • No political strife, except for the FMC telling you how awful the king in her region is, despite having a crazy cool premise with a dragon mythology-based elemental magic system whose users are denoted by their colorful beaded earrings.
  • Nothing happens in the plot except the very slow burn romance which doesn't pay off at the end
  • Magic doesn't really serve any purpose except to sound cool
  • The conlang is messy and doesn't work well
  • The writing itself is clunky, full of heavyhanded metaphors that don't land
    • Writing repeats itself multiple times with the same cadence and word usage
  • Characters with no real personality beyond the tropes they represent, could be replaced with any other romantasy main characters and it would make no difference
  • Poor LGBTQIA+ representation (despite it being praised in multiple reviews)
  • Because of all these issues, the book is 250 pages longer than it needs to be.

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