Rating: WORTHY!
If this author's name had been Claire Luna that would have been perfect, wouldn't it? Or maybe even better had it been Clair de Lune! LOL! I have a policy never to read books that have words like 'saga', 'chronicles' or 'cycle' on the cover. It did not say that on this cover, so it was only later that I discovered this was part of a tetralogy - or perhaps more accurately, a trilogy with a prequel added as an afterthought (maybe).
But I did read it and as it turned out, despite an issue or two here and there, it was a worthy read! That's not to say I will read any more of this 'cycle' (seriously WTF is a 'cycle'? Could it be called a bike? Maybe I'll write a bike one day. Or maybe I shall write the first Cycle Saga Chronicles?). But I digress. To me, this book was complete in itself, and certainly I feel no compulsion to pursue this story any further, which begs the question: why did the author?
I dunno. I guess there's pressure in the publishing world to write trilogies rather than standalones because they can vacuum up far more money from readers even if you give away the first one for free or at a discount. I will play no part in that. All of my books are standalones and complete in and of themselves, and many of them are free, especially during these difficult times when people are stuck at home so much.
This is because I don't write in any hope of becoming rich or milking money from readers. I write because I have to. I have no choice. If I'm not writing I go into withdrawal! Yes, my name is Ian Wood and I am a creative fiction addict. It's been about a half-hour since my last fix.... So, even if my novels are set in the same world as other stories, they're still standalones - except, that is, for the Little Rattuses™, but that's a children's series and with children's books, the rules are out the window - as indeed were The Little Rattuses....
Anyway, let's focus here. This story is about Kai - a young woman a few months from her momentous eighteenth birthday when her Moonburner powers are supposed to manifest. But it's a problem with Kai because she lives disguised as a boy, in a Sunburner village and they're at war with the Moonburners. This is actually more of a battle of the sexes because women are predictably of the Moon, and men of the Sun.
But of course Kai is outed and exiled. She survives against the odds and eventually is taken in at the Moonburner academy. That's not what it's called, but it's what it is - a special snowflake story with the Harry Potter-esque Kai arriving at Moonwarts. "You're a Moonburner, Harry!" The thing is that it's written well-enough that it doesn't feel trope-y or clichéd for the most part, and I appreciated that.
Why Kai's powers are supposed to manifest themselves at eighteen goes unexplained. There really is no difference between a person on the last day of their seventeenth year and the first of their eighteenth, so it's purely arbitrary and no explanation is given. I was willing to let that go despite that fact that's it's so trope that these powers arrive at eleven, or thirteen or whatever. It's usually an odd year for some reason, and it never really has any justification.
Anyway, the power allows her to utilize the Moon's light to do somewhat magical things. Why the Moon's light is different from the Sun's goes unexplained. Let's face it, the Moon makes no light of its own; it's just really good at reflecting the sun's light, so why are these two - Sunburner and Moonburner - different? That's another thing that's not gone into. Again I let it go.
I didn't get quite why Kai had to be raised as a boy, but maybe it was to do with her hair? I think I missed something somehwere, because on the one hand I thought the Moonburner's hair was supposed to become silver (the Sunburner's becomes gold) on her birthday, but apparently Kai's was silver from birth and her parents had to dye it to hide her true nature otherwise she'd have been left in the desert as a baby to die. This harks back to the ridiculous myth that the Spartans did the same to their children who were deemed unworthy. Maybe I misread or misunderstood something about the hair, but why there was no outrage about this barbaric treatment of newborns is left unaddressed.
Moving along, when Kai starts her classes at the Moonburner citadel, she also begins to learn that things are not what they seem and becomes involved in a literal underground. She also falls for the trope muscled Sunburner dude, which was sad and predictable for me. I don't know whether this is wish-fulfillment from these female authors or whether it's just that these book are conceived while these authors are ovulating, but it's insulting, you know? Anyway, in this particular novel, it wasn't dealt with too badly by the author, so I appreciated that, too.
Overall it was very readable, and I enjoyed it. I liked Kai as a character and enjoyed her gradual rise. It felt natural and organic, so there was nothing forced or magical about how she grew as a character, and that's both unusual in a YA novel and very much appreciated by me as a reader. I commend this novel as a worthy read.
