The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, Zen Cho – Book Review

Hello Humans!

I’m excited to be bringing you a review of another Novella – anyone else feel as though this format is on the rise? – and none other than Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water which was very firmly on my ‘hope to read in 2020’ list!

Goodreads Summary:

Zen Cho returns with a found family wuxia fantasy that combines the vibrancy of old school martial arts movies with characters drawn from the margins of history.

A bandit walks into a coffeehouse, and it all goes downhill from there. Guet Imm, a young votary of the Order of the Pure Moon, joins up with an eclectic group of thieves (whether they like it or not) in order to protect a sacred object, and finds herself in a far more complicated situation than she could have ever imagined.

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I have been reading a larger number of novellas lately, but I wouldn’t say I’ve read enough to be able to quite put a finger on why some things really work for me and others…don’t. Sadly this was in the latter camp.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the writing in this is beautiful, and the characterisation was definitely there –  I really enjoyed Guet Imm as a character and I’d love a longer piece from her perspective.

But I didn’t quite feel there was enough meat to this story – and that might just be my own reading of it – for me to truly fall in love with it. That’s not to say I wanted this to be a full novel, I’m a big fan of the way the novella format means you can dive straight into the story – but there was some narrative element that just stopped me from fully falling through the pages of this book.

I think I wanted a deeper relationship/exploration of relationship building between these characters, I liked that there is an amount of trust built (and lost) across the pages but I feel as though there could have been more done.

I’m wondering if a re-read of this, knowing how the story goes, would yield more than a first reading – and I’ll definitely be keeping this on my ‘revisit at some point’ list. But this is similar to how I felt about Sorcerer to the Crown – which felt similarly lackluster – while I loved The True Queen. So perhaps Zen Cho, for me, is just one of those authors where I like some of their books and not others?

Novellas are always going to be fairly subjective, personal taste things – for me this didn’t quite hit the mark. I think there are some interesting elements and the overall character development and story is good – but I needed just a little more bite to the book for me to really love this.

(worth saying the usual ‘I am a white lady so odds are I missed a fair amount of the nuance in this story please seek out own voices reviews’ here)

My rating: 3/5 stars

I received a free digital advanced review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley – all opinions are my own.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is out June 23rd!

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What say you? What are some of your favourite novellas? Let me know in the comments below!

J