Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao

Book Review

Melody Bowles

Water Moon is an unusual, beautiful and imaginative book. It’s filled with extraordinary imagery and its primary world follows surreal dream logic. For example, the characters travel by jumping through puddles, riding origami birds and even by being folded up and posted like paper. It’s a fantasy novel, but the writing style and themes evoke literary fiction.

Hana inherits a magical pawnshop from her father. Customers trade their regrets by giving up all memory of the choices they made to the pawnshop. The day after Hana’s father retires, he disappears, chasing a stolen “choice” from the shop’s vault. Along with almost-customer Keishin, Hana sets out on a journey to find him. They are pursued by the Shiikuin, ghoulish masked entities, who will deliver punishment if Hana is unable to find the stolen choice.

Hana and Keishin form a close relationship while journeying together. It’s a bittersweet connection – Keishin must return to his own world and Hana is engaged to someone else. Keishin’s role is an important one – he’s a physics professor from our own ordinary world. Despite this, he’s more than willing to accept the dream logic and impossible physics of Hana’s world. He copes by retreating to a restaurant in his mind, staffed by his academic mentor, Ramesh.

Many of the fantastical locations stick in my mind – a village that creates the night sky every night as though it were a craft project. A train station where people camp for years waiting for their train to come in. A library of lost moments that changed the world forever. Each one feels like it could be the basis of its own novel.

The plot twists and contorts as the story progresses, making leaps of logic that sometimes need pause for thought. I’d suggest a slower reading pace rather than blazing through it, in order not to miss any fine details.

Read Water Moon if you’d like an excursion into a highly original world teeming with eerie and beautiful imagery. Reading it is a magical and unpredictable experience.