Review: Third Moon Passing

Third Moon Passing by Rina Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have very little background in Asian myth and folklore, but I usually enjoy books that draw on it, so I picked this one up. It's crammed with Korean folk religion and its gods, in the context of a historical expedition by the US in the late 19th century to try to break Korea's isolation and open it up to trade, so I feel like I learned a lot about topics I was completely unaware of previously.

Where it didn't work so well for me was that there were too many characters that weren't sufficiently distinct from one another, and that didn't give me enough in the text to tell them apart, either in their voices or with a few words of description scattered in to remind me of their uniqueness. In particular, there were a large number of minor characters who were members of the Korean pantheon, all of whom had long names that were sometimes quite similar, and if it hadn't been for the cast list in the front of the book I would have had no idea, most of the time, who each one was (not that it mattered a lot of the time; they were often interchangeable). Worse, I had to refer to that cast list constantly throughout my reading, even towards the end of what is a fairly long book, because they hadn't been made distinct enough for me to remember who they were without checking. Even the two young human women from very different backgrounds who play a large role in the plot were hard for me to keep straight at times, because their voices were indistinguishable.

There are tricks an author can use to give characters more distinctiveness: a couple of descriptive tags that recur (Roger Zelazny's method, which is highly effective), or a bit of backstory that isn't part of their role in the plot but just makes them a more rounded character, or the vocabulary they use and how they phrase things. In the case of the gods, even reminding us which one was the god of gates and which was the god of the Big Dipper a bit more often would have helped.

I felt, too, that the plot moved slowly, and obviously not because the characters were being developed; more because there were minor incidents narrated at length, and places described in depth, where more plot or more characterization would have worked better for me. This may simply be a matter of taste or style, though.

The narrative style is a bit unusual. There's a first-person narrator, one of the gods, but sometimes it's third-person narration of scenes in which she isn't present, but apparently is aware of what is going on because it is relevant to her interests - not omniscience, because there are things she doesn't know until other people find them out, but something akin to it. Just because it's unusual doesn't mean it can't work, and for the most part this narrative approach did work for me, but others may stumble over it.

I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and there may be more editing to come; the author makes most of the common errors, but doesn't make them constantly, so it's better than most, but it could still stand one more polish. There's at least one place where the wrong name is used for a character, and another where a punch turns into a kick, but otherwise the continuity is good.

It's a first novel, and it shows, but there's potential here if the author can develop her skills, especially characterization. It's interesting enough that I'm putting it on my Best of the Year recommendation list, though in the lowest tier.

View all my reviews