When the Moon Hatched by Sarah A. Parker – A Book Review

Spoiler-Free Overview

In a world with fae, dragons, and elemental magic, Raeve has been surviving as an assassin and general badass. But her world gets turned upside down, and she finds herself in the custody of the king of the Burn. Now, she needs to find her way back home.

A lame overview, I know, but most anything else is a spoiler.

Liz’s Thoughts and Feelings

It’s kind of difficult to write a proper review of this without spoilers, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

The Good:

– The world-building is delightful, though it’s sometimes hard to follow (we’ll get to that in ‘The Bad’). We have classic elemental magic mixed with dragons, but Parker puts her own spin on it. There plot is filled with different types of dragons, a complex political landscape, and a strange, new world.

– I love a sassy, crass FMC. Raeve fits that mold. She’s a bit unoriginal, but I’ll get over it.

– It took awhile for the pacing to get going, but once we got a handle on the world, things were exciting. I enjoyed the location shifts that helped to break up the story.

The Bad:

– The book is too long, and that’s saying something coming from me. I love long books with chapters and chapters of interpersonal conflict, character growth, and a variety of plot points. But, there’s a lot of words here that don’t add value. It’s almost like the author wanted to be as flowery as possible, but it feels flat. A lot of editing is needed. I skipped or skimmed whole paragraphs after a point because they simply didn’t matter.

– The world-building was excessive. I understand the idea of creating new words for everything to enhance the strange and fantastical aspects of the world. However, it was tedious and brought me out of the book. It took way too long to get sucked into the world because I was constantly checking the appendix. I was still doing this two-thirds through the book.

– Raeve’s character growth is non-existent. And here’s the thing – I’m all for two steps forward and one step back. It makes our characters feel real. But Raeve was one step forward and one step back. So she never changed or changed only minimally.

– Kaan is super two-dimensional. He’s obsessed with his ex-lover and tries to apply his centuries-old love to Raeve instead of getting to know who she is today. As we get to know him, there’s not enough tension. We know he’s the good guy, so why hem and haw over whether he’s good or bad.

– For a story told in first person, there were too many POVs. The benefit of first person is connecting the reader to the thoughts and emotions of the character. However, Raeve’s inner thoughts were super annoying when she was constantly complaining about things we, as the audience, already knew the answers to.