An Arrow to the Moon
by Emily X.R. PanAlso by this author: The Astonishing Color of After
on April 12, 2022
Genres: Young Adult, Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 400
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
Romeo and Juliet meets Chinese mythology in this magical novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Astonishing Color of After
Hunter Yee has perfect aim with a bow and arrow, but all else in his life veers wrong. He’s sick of being haunted by his family’s past mistakes. The only things keeping him from running away are his little brother, a supernatural wind, and the bewitching girl at his new high school.
Luna Chang dreads the future. Graduation looms ahead, and her parents’ expectations are stifling. When she begins to break the rules, she finds her life upended by the strange new boy in her class, the arrival of unearthly fireflies, and an ominous crack spreading across the town of Fairbridge.
As Hunter and Luna navigate their families’ enmity and secrets, everything around them begins to fall apart. All they can depend on is their love…but time is running out, and fate will have its way.
Content Tags:
Perfect for readers who want:
- A forbidden romance that somehow ends up being super sweet and heartwarming anyway
- Utterly adorable sibling bonds
- Magical realism sprinkled into a contemporary romance
- Beautiful, flowing writing that paints scenes so well
- Lots of family secrets (the dangerous kind!)
- Romeo and Juliet retelling
- Chinese mythology retelling (particularly Chang’e and Hou Yi)
Many thanks to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers and TBR and Beyond Tours for an ARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Quotes are taken from an unfinished product and may differ from the final version.
I have been waiting for Emily X.R. Pan’s next book since I read the last word in The Astonishing Color of After. I absolutely loved that book, and couldn’t wait for her to write another! So you know I jumped on this one right away. Romeo and Juliet meets Chinese mythology? Um, YES. Sign me up!
An Arrow to the Moon combines Romeo and Juliet with Chinese mythology and Pan’s utterly gorgeous writing style. It’s a book about sweet love, magical realism, sibling bonds, and the ways family secrets hurt everyone.
I ended up having very mixed feelings about this book. I really enjoyed the first 80% of the book and was absolutely hooked. Pan’s gorgeous writing style is everything I wanted, and the romance, while not what I had expected, was adorable. Unfortunately, the ending was extremely sudden and wrapped absolutely nothing up. I was very confused and disappointed that many of these characters I had journeyed with throughout this book had no resolutions to their stories!
If you’ve never read an Emily X.R. Pan book, you are in for a treat, because her writing is very flowy and gorgeous, invoking an atmosphere that perfectly suits a myth or a tale.
Not gonna lie, this writing style is what initially endeared me to her writing. It’s very emotive and captures the complexities of being human in a vivid way. But it also paints such a wonderful picture of the scenery. In a book like An Arrow to the Moon, where it’s filled with magical realism, this really brought the story to life for me! I could practically see the fireflies (never mind that I love fireflies in general!).
He wondered if he would ever know what they were hiding from.
All he knew was that it had to do with a man they’d been trying to escape since before Cody was born.
If you’re expecting a dramatic, angsty romance, you’re bound to be disappointed. What we get instead is a super cute romance that I enjoyed just as much!
When I first heard Romeo and Juliet, I thought for sure this would be ill-fated lovers filled with drama and angst. That’s not the case. In fact, the reasoning behind the “family feud” is an extremely weak one that didn’t make a ton of sense to me and felt extremely contrived. It isn’t just that their families forbid it, though. Luna and Hunter are very different people from very different backgrounds, and that sometimes comes out in their interactions and their life goals, which can make any relationship challenging.
Despite not being quite what I expected, I did enjoy the romance between Luna and Hunter. It’s super sweet, filled with lots of support and banter. It’s also rather insta-lovey, but it makes sense in the context of the mythology it’s based on (which is Chang’e and Hou Yi). If you’re a fan of sweet romance, this book will like be perfect for you!
She giggled. “Neither did I. What do you think caused the actual seducing?”
“Let’s see.” He propped himself up on his elbows. “Well. You’ve got a very practical nose.”
Luna snorted. “A practical nose!”
“See? It’s even expressive. Very efficient use of your assets.”
An Arrow to the Moon is about so much more than romance. It delves into some rather difficult topics, particularly around stereotypes and families.
Luna and Hunter couldn’t come from more different backgrounds. Luna herself is a stereotype. She’s a straight-A student drowning under the weight of her parents’ expectations and the future they’ve dreamed up for her, even though it’s not necessarily one she wants. She just doesn’t know how to tell them, because she loves her parents and just wants to make them proud.
Hunter, on the other hand, is the black sheep of the family. Nothing he does seems to be good enough for his parents, who seem ready to be rid of him. Hunter would leave . . . if it weren’t for his little brother, who is every bit the “good child” and whose sensitive nature makes Hunter concerned about leaving him alone in a world that can be cruel.
Hunter’s family is poor, and Luna’s is wealthy. Both have deep, dark secrets, though. Secrets that threaten to tear the families apart.
Stay out of trouble, his mother said, time and again.
He tried, for the most part. But it was hard to fix a crooked arrow, forever veering from the intended path. The times when things went mostly right, his parents still had a way of finding fault in everything he did.
There is a lot going on in this book beyond just ill-fated lovers. There’s also mysterious relics, family secrets, and characters trying to find their place in a world they don’t feel they belong to.
I went in expecting some drama between families and lots of angsty love, so I wasn’t expecting there to be so much going on! Lots of action and secrets and personal drama. Even though this technically ends as a fantasy, the beginning feels very contemporary, with a spice of magic realism mixed in for good measure. There’s a lot of soul-searching and deciding the type of person they want to be.
I wish the story had given a little bit more background on some of these characters, because there are hints at larger plots and a larger story buried in here. However, it never quite comes to fruition (which makes sense when considering that these subplots fall by the wayside and never complete in general). Still, I found myself so invested in those juicy little dramatic tidbits that I wanted more of it alongside the main story.
She paused for a beat. “I don’t know.”
“So if I go do something privileged, with the Asian stamp of approval, but I do it as far from home as possible . . . it’s not running away? But if I set out on my own with the support of nobody and try to make a life for myself—that’s cowardly? That’s running away?”
“I don’t know,” she said again.
“Herd mentality,” he said. “Your transformation into an Asian sheep is just about complete.”
The book sort of just . . . ends. With the majority of the plot left unresolved, which was kind of frustrating.
It would be one thing if the story were just told from Luna and Hunter’s perspectives, because their story wraps up just fine. It isn’t, however. There are at least four other points of view from other characters in the story. There’s a whole grandiose plot outside the romance that’s part family drama, part family secret, which I thought was interesting and wanted to know more about. However, it kind of just falls by the wayside in the end and nothing about it is actually concluded. I still have so many questions!
About Emily X.R. Pan
Emily X.R. Pan is the New York Times and National Indie bestselling author of THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER, which won the APALA Honor Award and the Walter Honor Award, and received six starred reviews. It was also an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, and named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 Best YA Books of All Time. Emily co-created the FORESHADOW anthology and teaches creative writing at New York University and other institutions. She lives on Lenape land (in Brooklyn, New York), but was originally born in the Midwestern United States to immigrant parents from Taiwan. She received her MFA in fiction from the NYU Creative Writing Program, where she was a Goldwater Fellow as well as the editor-in-chief of Washington Square Review. She was the founding editor-in-chief of Bodega Magazine and has been awarded residencies at Djerassi (2017) and Caldera (2019). She spends her free time playing the mandolin, making art, and training her furry dog-beast to balance on strange objects. Her next novel, AN ARROW TO THE MOON, will be published by Little, Brown in April 2022. Visit Emily online at exrpan.com, and find her on Twitter and Instagram: @exrpan.
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I rated this a bit higher than you did cos I was a sucker for the heart-swoony romance and the Chinese mythology (went on a bit of a deep dive after reading lol) but I 100% agree about the ending. It was pretty anticlimactic and a bit ‘eh’ with how everything just abruptly… Stops? I’d guess it’s to tie it in with the original myth but I wanted answers! Lol
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I’m always in for forbidden romance. This sounds really interesting. Great review!
A Romeo & Juliet story that’s cute instead of angsty? Sign me up!
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