Review: Daughter of the Moon Goddess
Daughter of the Moon Goddess, by Sue Lynn Tan, is the first in her Celestial Kingdom series and has roughly a squillion positive reviews on Amazon, so it must be good.
Verdict: My god, Sue Lynn. It’s SHOW not TELL.
For the main character’s sake, I wanted this book to be more bearable than it was. This review is going to be spitefully succinct because it all boils down to one fatal flaw on the author’s part (and the editor’s) - that of the 128,000 words included, about half of them could have been cut and the novel would have lost nothing and been less exasperating.
There’s really no point in talking about structure or pace or character development - I can’t remember any of it because there were so. many. words.
I first read a more recent novel by Tan, Immortal, which suffered from the same gregariousness in a slightly grating way but the rich world building at least kept me going. Feeling in a rapid consumption mood (because…January), I picked up Daughter, which is Tan’s first novel and it shows. The author gives you everything. Every. Thing. Subtlety be damned. Every thought, every feeling, every internal explanation or justification. Often more than once. I found myself just skipping entire paragraphs between dialogue lines because they detracted from rather than contributed to my understanding of what was going on.
I’m more disappointed with Tan’s editor than the author herself, although if she’s been to a writing class ever, she should surely know better. It does seem she’s improving with experience - Immortal was tedious but enjoyable. Daughter was exasperating, despite the fact that I rather liked the main characters and the on-again off-again precariousness of the romance, which I thought might actually break the mold, but alas did not. I also appreciated the scope of the timeline - I’m always interested in watching how authors build their characters over years in a single novel. And just like Immortal, which takes place in the same universe as Daughter, the Eastern world crafting is truly imaginative and fresh, at least for this Southern U.S. reader.
Still, I’m not reaching for the second installment in the series. I felt like I’d run a marathon after I finished the first book, and not in a “redefining success for myself in my post-partum era” kind of way. In a “I thought I signed up for a 10k” kind of way.
And then I picked up The Poppy War, which also has Eastern tones, a warrior protagonist, and a massive scope of world building. And I know they are for different audiences, I KNOW, okay. But damn, that is just not a flattering comparison for Daughters.
Who would I recommend Daughter of the Moon Goddess to? Someone with the patience of Job. It’s got a squillion gushing reviews on Amazon, that great aggregator of mediocrity, so I guess someone out there likes having all their thoughts placed into their heads for them.