Book Review Tuesday (3/25/25) – Water Moon

Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!

Even with me being slightly less online than I’ve been in the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of buzz about Water Moon. Enough that it warranted a hardcover copy that was a whole $31 at Barnes & Noble…not even a special edition or anything, just a regular copy. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a less expensive try, so I got it on hold at the library. Though it didn’t live up to both the $31 or the Studio Ghibli comparisons it warranted, Water Moon was a heartfelt, if a little confused, about the connectivity of people and the choices that lead us to the places we end up.

Enjoy this week’s review!

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao

Hana Ishikawa is set to receive a very unique inheritance. Her father has given her control over his old shop in Tokyo; tourists and passersby will see a ramen restaurant, but once you look inside, you find that its wares are something completely different: a pawnshop where you can exchange your life’s regrets and unpleasant choices. But on her first day on the job, Hana finds the shop destroyed. Looking for answers, she instead finds Keishin, an American tourist searching for answers of his own. Their search leads them into a strange realm of magic and wonder that may hold the keys to the problems they’re facing…and more.

TW/CW: loss of loved ones, grief, abandonment, mentions of abortion/pregnancy issues (brief), blood/violence, descriptions of injury

Water Moon was a good stab at magical realism; it had some beautiful elements that had me enraptured, but not for long enough. Its fundamental issue is that it wanted to do too much but didn’t have the space to do it. What we have here, messy as it was, at least read well and presented some moments of lovely, whimsical magical realism.

While this novel had some issues throughout with thematic cohesiveness, I do think that the central one (or the one that felt like it was supposed to be central, at least), was a beautiful one—connectivity through the choices we make. Hana’s life is dictated by regret, but she learns, through jumping through fantastical worlds, that it’s the unexpected things in life that bring us together that make life worth living. I especially loved the connection to the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Detector, something that Keishin has returned to Japan to study—capturing the secrets of this elusive, subatomic particle that can only be observed (if you’re lucky) in an observatory filled with distilled water underground. I’m a sucker for when writers are able to articulate that emotion with science, especially with something as misunderstood as physics; Water Moon did a lovely job of using that as part of the larger metaphor about how lucky we are to experience the unexpected, and how that can bring us together. I just wished Yambao had done more with it, but what we had, I loved.

I also loved the worldbuilding in Water Moon! I don’t think the childlike wonder that Yambao was going for was properly executed all the way, but I love the inherent whimsy that’s integral to holding the worldbuilding together. You travel to these parallel, unseeable worlds found in puddles on the ground, and in those worlds, you find everything from villages dedicated to hanging the stars at night and origami and paper planes with a life of their own. Even with the rather sinister undercurrent that runs through it, the glimpses of the fantasy worlds were almost dreamlike. They had a distinct quality of feeling like the kinds of fantasies you imagined when you were a kid (especially the puddle travel), which enhanced the feel of the world overall.

However, that whimsy only came off in varying degrees. That was due to the writing, which often came off rather rote. Yambao presented the reader with a myriad of fantastical, objectively wondrous elements in this parallel world that Hana and Keishin venture into, only to describe it in the flattest terms. For a magical realism novel, the writing felt almost utilitarian, designed to describe a setting or a phenomenon with the absolute minimum amount of description for the reader to get an idea of what it looked like. Sure, Water Moon didn’t need to be excessively flowery or purple in its prose, but when you have a setting as whimsical and magical as this, more description is necessary.

The same applies to the feelings of the characters—they hardly seemed to react to their settings, only serving to be chess pieces that were dragged around at will when the plot called for it. Keishin at least had something of a personality, but other than him, most of the characters, including Hana, were defined only by what had happened to them. They were defined only by their backstories, and that dictated everything that they did throughout the story—not their motivations or their personalities. All of this, combined with Yambao’s relatively flat writing, made their romance lackluster. Not only did it feel like the classic “oh, our main characters are a boy and a girl, therefore they have to fall in love,” it was just so rushed and un-earned—we didn’t get nearly enough development (or page time) from either of them to merit a full-blown romance. Even though they’d jumped through magical puddles together and visited whimsical worlds, I found myself barely caring for either of them, or their romance.

Back to the subject of themes…I wholly believe that a book shouldn’t be constrained by talking only about one theme. In fact, most every book does that anyway—having a book centered around a single theme without even a handful of sub-themes or topics is practically impossible. Like I (and Yambao) said, everything is connected. Water Moon, however, had a problem with articulating it. Beyond the bit about choices and connectivity, Water Moon wanted to say so much about so many things—motherhood, grief, regret, parent-child relationships—and yet it didn’t know what to say about any of them. A theme was introduced with the same emotional weight as the central theme, it got 50 pages of page time, and then it barely resolved itself. Water Moon had almost no sense of direction, leaving me with a book that didn’t resolve itself in a satisfying or logical way. Ultimately, this felt like a case of too many cooks in the kitchen—it was an ambitious attempt to tackle every theme and give it the same weight, but it ended up in a plot (and characters) that ran around confused for almost all 374 pages and underbaked statements on what it wanted to say.

Overall, an ambitious and dreamlike novel with a world that was a treat to explore, but offered up flat characters and had no sense of what it wanted to do with itself. 3.5 stars!

Water Moon is a standalone, but Samantha Sotto Yambao is also the author of Before Ever After, Love and Gravity, A Dream of Trees, and The Beginning of Always (under the name Samantha Sotto).

Today’s song:

That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!