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A review by themermaddie
The Moon Represents My Heart by Pim Wangtechawat
4.0
4.5 stars
for fans of magical family sagas like The Immortalists, this is perfect. this book is beautifully written and a heartwrenching tale of a family lost in time, and how the threads of fate can tie people together.
this is one of those books that i struggle really hard with summarising, especially because it's so good but it's also just so human that the events in this book are (besides the time travel) extremely ordinary. i think my favourite bits were joshua and lily's story, bc i felt like they were the glue, the intersection of all the stories, and i liked to see them as young adults as well as the parental authority figures. this book is about time travel, but it's also mostly about family. there are so many good depictions of the immigrant experience here, as well as the beauty and pain of being pulled away those you love, due to time or space. it's about the people and times that make us feel like we're home, and the tragedy of not being able to keep those special moments forever is what makes stories like these so bittersweet.
where this book lost that last star for me was the ending. i'm all for am ambiguous ending, but i would've liked at least a little bit more of a conclusion. where it stands, it feels like an extremely open ending with a purple prose finish, and i would much prefer at least some sort of answer to like, every question the book raises. you never find out what happens in josh and lily's experiment, which is what i assumed the driving question of the entire novel would lead up to, you never learn what happens to tommy in the present day, and you never know what happens to peggy. some of those things i can accept as literary tragedies and victims of the genre, but for every single question to be left open feels so... incomplete. maybe it's left like that to replicate how unpredictable and unknowable life is, but i don't accept that. that's not why i read fiction, anyway. i want to know that the wangs are okay :(
for fans of magical family sagas like The Immortalists, this is perfect. this book is beautifully written and a heartwrenching tale of a family lost in time, and how the threads of fate can tie people together.
this is one of those books that i struggle really hard with summarising, especially because it's so good but it's also just so human that the events in this book are (besides the time travel) extremely ordinary. i think my favourite bits were joshua and lily's story, bc i felt like they were the glue, the intersection of all the stories, and i liked to see them as young adults as well as the parental authority figures. this book is about time travel, but it's also mostly about family. there are so many good depictions of the immigrant experience here, as well as the beauty and pain of being pulled away those you love, due to time or space. it's about the people and times that make us feel like we're home, and the tragedy of not being able to keep those special moments forever is what makes stories like these so bittersweet.
where this book lost that last star for me was the ending. i'm all for am ambiguous ending, but i would've liked at least a little bit more of a conclusion. where it stands, it feels like an extremely open ending with a purple prose finish, and i would much prefer at least some sort of answer to like, every question the book raises. you never find out what happens in josh and lily's experiment, which is what i assumed the driving question of the entire novel would lead up to, you never learn what happens to tommy in the present day, and you never know what happens to peggy. some of those things i can accept as literary tragedies and victims of the genre, but for every single question to be left open feels so... incomplete. maybe it's left like that to replicate how unpredictable and unknowable life is, but i don't accept that. that's not why i read fiction, anyway. i want to know that the wangs are okay :(