Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
Grace Lin
2010 Newbery Honor Book
Folk/Fantasy
When I started the task of reading the Newbery list, this was one of the first books I picked up from the library. I was enchanted. I couldn't put it down.
Grace Lin doesn't so much tell the story as weave the story. The main story is that is Minli, a girl who lives next to Fruitless Mountain and hopes to change her family's poor fortune by seeking the Old Man of the Moon. The main story contains "stories within a story" that eventually connect back to the main story. Lin makes it easy to tell when we are reading one of these by not only putting a clear title for each story but also changing the font so it is easy for the reader to see when the story ends and the main plot picks back up. One of the best features of this book is that there is color all over the pages. She adds small splashes of color throughout with some additional full color illustrated pages which are absolutely gorgeous.
At the end of the book, Lin tells the story of how she ignored her Taiwanese heritage until one day she picked up a book of Chinese fairy tales that her mother had put on her bookshelf and rediscovered her culture. She traveled to China and the surrounding areas which gave her inspiration for many of the illustrations and places in the book. Lin has another series of books based on her life as a Taiwanese American girl (Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat and Dumpling Days) and she has written a follow up book to this book in a similar style called Starry River of the Sky.
I feel this book was a much better book than the medal winner for 2010, When You Reach Me. Personally, I think it was robbed.
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