Spoiler-free summary: Minli is a young girl who lives near Fruitless Mountain with her parents. Her mother wishes the family had more money, while her father loves to tell stories, including ones about the Old Man of the Moon. Minli decides to leave her village to find the Old Man and ask him how to change her family’s fortune, and has adventures along the way. The book is interspersed with short folk tales that are related to each other and eventually with the main narrative. A fun book that straddles the line between fantasy and mythology.
Discussion: I’ve read one book by Grace Lin, last year’s Chinese Menu, which was on SLJ’s Heavy Medal blog short list. In some ways that book was very different: there was no through-story, instead it was more of a short story collection. But at the same time, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon has elements of a short story collection, and the same kind as Chinese Menu – the book sets up characters to tell Chinese folk tales from time to time, and it even sets them off as breaks in the main story. The primary narrative itself was a folk tale-style fantasy story, which has its own type of vibe to it that I haven’t seen much of elsewhere. Well, I can reach back into my Newbery winner readthrough, because the fourth and fifth winners ever (Tales from Silver Lands in 1925 and Shen of the Sea in 1926) were folk tale collections, and Chinese Menu hit that style dead on, as do the mini-stories in this one.
It’s an interesting style to read. There was never any true dramatic tension, since there was never any question of Minli succeeding. Granted, folk tales can go very wrong for main characters, but with Minli being a virtuous protagonist, any snag was going to work out. (In mythology, deus ex machina is kind of the default outcome.) Like I said in the summary, though, this was a fun one, because it’s interesting to see how pieces fit together and how the resolution solves all of the problems that arose. Not a ton of depth here, but a nice dip into a cultural tradition I haven’t had much exposure to before.
I’m curious about my next one, Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison. Lenski wrote the 1946 winner Strawberry Girl, which I absolutely hated. Here’s hoping this one’s better!
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