Daughter of the Moon Goddess - Sue Lynn Tan

AUTHOR: Sue Lynn Tan

SERIES: The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #1

GENRE: Chinese Fantasy

RATING: 4 stars.

In a Nutshell: Loved the plot. Loved the Fantasy world and everything out-worldly. Liked the characters. Hated the writing style.

Story:

Inspired by the Chinese legend of the moon goddess, this story tells of a young girl Xingyin accustomed to living alone on the moon with her mother Chang’e. What she doesn’t know is that Chang’e has been exiled for stealing the elixir of immortality from the Celestial Emperor. Due to her presence coming to light, Xingyin is forced to escape from the moon and somehow lands up in the Celestial Kingdom, working as a maid for a local wealthy family. When there’s an opportunity to train alongside Crown Prince Liwei, she grabs at it, not knowing that her life will change from that moment. What follows is an interesting story of secrets and scandals, battles with strange and scary monsters, and even forbidden romantic entanglements.

The story comes to us in the first person perspective of Xingyin.

Where the book worked well for me:

😍 The book has a distinctly episodic feel to it. Each segment of the story can be compartmentalised, and each has its own appeal. Some segments work better than others, but most were pretty good. I enjoyed the action sequences most of all, what with dragons and mind magic and octopuses and what not, each fight sequence was astounding to read.

😍 The author’s world building is exquisite. The story had a genuine feel of a Chinese legend, even though it is only partially based on Chang’e’s story. The Celestial Kingdom, the various creatures, the magical weaponry, everything was enjoyable.

😍 The characters are going to leave their marks on your mind, though you may not like them all. Xingyin is outspoken, impetuous and rude. She thinks only about herself and hardly ever learns from her mistakes. As such, she makes for quite an irritating protagonist. I suppose it’s a YA thing because many YA books seem to have such unlikeable leading characters. It works for the story, and that’s the most important thing. The two male leads have decently-sketched characters too, though both go through drastic behavioural changes as the story proceeds. Nevertheless, the characters shoulder the story well.

😍 The female representation in the story is amazing. I loved how many of the soldiers in the Celestial army and other key characters were women and the plot uses them well. This is unlike usual legendary fantasies.

😍 While there are the usual Fantasy-Romance tropes such as romantic triangles and an all-surviving MC who always wins despite the odds, they are handled pretty well and don't feel boring.

😍 The book is volume one of an intended duology, but it has no cliffhanger ending. The story sets the foundation well for whatever is to come and at the same time, satisfies its readers with proper closure.

Where the book could have worked better for me:

😒 The only but biggest factor against the book: its writing style. God, how I hated it! As it comes to us from Xingyin‘s 1st person pov, I expected a certain amount of rambling, What I didn’t expect was for almost every paragraph to contain at least 3-4 sentences on her personal thoughts, even in between dialogues. This inner monologue became so irritating after a while. A typical scene in the book would be as follows:

↳ Some character mouthing sentence 1 of his dialogue.

↳ Xingyin with her thoughts: My heart thudded. My mind was in tremor. My hands shook… Blah blah blah medley of body parts and their reactions…..

↳ Some character mouthing sentence 2 of his dialogue.

↳ Xingyin with some more thoughts; I couldn’t believe what he said. I felt like … insert descriptive simile here… Heat rushed into my cheeks … more body parts mentioned….

↳ Some character mouthing sentence 3 of his dialogue.

↳ You guessed it. Xingyin coming up again…. Sigh.

This is even worse in audio because you feel like you are listening to the most egotistical person on earth who wants to talk about EVERY SINGLE DAMN EMOTION!!!!

There are also too many similes and metaphors. While many of them were apt and beautiful, it was an overkill. All this adds too much of clutter to the proceedings. The story would have worked even better had it been crisper by chopping out such needless flourishes.

The audiobook experience:

The audiobook, clocking at 15 hours, is narrated by Natalie Naudus. I appreciate the decision to take an Asian-American narrator for the story. She performs remarkably, and her voices and her emotions are good. The problem was, her accent is strongly American. While I am okay with this usually, the word that bugged me the most was her pronunciation of “duty” as “doody”. I understand this is quite common in some American accents, but it was very distracting to my ears! Thus, in a book where Liwei was constantly struggling with his “doody”, I just ended up rolling my eyes multiple times.

I was pretty torn over my rating for this one because I loved the story so much and I hated the writing style almost equally. But what it boils down to is this: do I want to read the second part of this duology? Turns out, in spite of all my complaints, I do, eagerly! And that tilted the balance in favour.

4 stars from me. (5 stars for the plot, world-building, fantastical elements and action sequences. 3 stars for the character sketching. 2 stars for the writing style.)

My thanks to HarperCollins UK Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “Daughter of the Moon Goddess”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.