Book Review: Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao

I have a problem. The problem is that I enjoy cozy books, but I have a very low tolerance for whimsy. Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao was heavily promoted as a cozy book this winter, and I suppose it is cozy, but above all it is whimsical. In fact, I described it to my friends as “intolerably whimsical” and I stand by that. Of course, if your tolerance is much higher than mine, you might find this the most charming thing you ever read. This gets to the heart of why I don’t give books star or letter grades — it’s so subjective, and a book that was a big MEH for me could be a big AWW or WOW for you.

Water Moon opens with Hana about to start her first day of running her family’s pawn shop after her father retires. But there are two surprising things: one, this isn’t any pawn shop, it’s a shop where you trade in your regrets over a major decision you made. And two, Hana’s father has disappeared after an apparent break-in.

Hana’s pawn shop straddles two worlds; it is accessed through the front door of a Tokyo ramen shop, but it properly exists in the magical, whimsical world her family is from. In order to try to find her father, she will reluctantly team up with a physicist from our world, whisking him away on an adventure as they travel from one unbelievable location to the next.

If you look at blurbs for this book, you’ll see a lot of “Ghibli” and “Miyazaki” and it definitely seems to want to especially evoke Spirited Away, with that otherworldiness. I just think it takes it too far. I say this as someone who has only watched a few Studio Ghibli movies and left each one thinking “well that was pretty nice.” I am really, really not the target audience for this book. I imagine this is what it would feel like to read Legends & Lattes if you had only ever played a couple sessions of D&D.

My big problem with this book, and with any book that feels too whimsical, is it felt like there was very little internal logic. Things seemed to happen and exist for the vibes, not because they made any sense in the context of the world as we knew it. It felt very dream-like, but one of those annoying dreams that you end up waking yourself up from by asking yourself too many questions about why things are the way they are.*

Another big problem for me was that for most of the book, it felt like the main characters completely lacked any interiority. I had no real idea how Hana felt about her father being missing (for example), unless she spoke her thoughts out loud, and even then, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you if that’s how she really felt or what she wanted the person she was talking to to think she felt.

The final problem I’ll mention in this review is that I don’t think there was a single openly LGBTQIA+ character in this book. I have very little patience for authors who can’t include even one queer side character in their book.

As I was reading Water Moon, I was struck by some similarities to Neverwhere, both good and bad, so this could potentially be a good replacement for you if that was one of your comfort re-reads and you also like Studio Ghibli.

I will say, this dealt with some surprisingly dark and creepy stuff for a book that is supposed to be cozy, but then again, most cozy mysteries are about literal murders, so I guess sometimes you need a little darkness to make the coziness cozier. Let’s go ahead and use that to segue into…

CWs and TWs: Parental death, parental abandonment, creepy monster guys, reference to a hate crime, and I don’t really know how to discuss this without spoiling it, but I’ll just say there’s something weird and cruel with babies.

Source and Format: I borrowed the ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries.

*Maybe this is just a me thing. My spouse has this running theme of being woken up from dreams because the version of me in their dream pokes holes in the logic of the dream until their subconscious gives up or something.

Reading Challenge Prompts

Nook & Cranny (Card 1): Strange Doors & New Worlds. Our characters travel from place to place in a variety of ways: puddles and paper, songs and rumors. Any one of these would have been pretty cool (especially the origami paper door), but when it started to feel like every destination had a new, more whimsical way to reach it, I started to wonder if anyone in Hana’s world ever just, y’know, walks somewhere.

Book Riot: “Cozy” book by a BIPOC author. I did some searching and it looks like Samantha Sotto Yambao is Filipino. She does mention a sensitivity reader in her acknowledgements who I assume helped her with her depiction of Japanese culture.

Brick & Mortar: Cozy Fantasy or Romantasy. As little patience as I had for the whimsy in this book, I have even less patience for the male love interests in most of what’s being published as “romantasy” right now, so I think cozy was the right path for me on this prompt.

Reading Challenge Progress

Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 4 of 25, no bingos.

Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 6 of 25, no bingos.

Book Riot: 6 of 25.

Physical TBR: 1 of 12.

Brick & Mortar: 13 of 25, 0 bingos*.
*I’ve completed several of the non-reading prompts, hence the mismatch with the number of reviews!

World of Whimm: 5 of 24, no bingos.