I’ve had Moonbound on my TBR shelf physically for a while. It’s also been long enough that I don’t remember hardly anything about Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (first big hit, by this author). I remember that I really enjoyed both Mr. Penumbra and the follow-up, but not direct sequel, Sourdough. I vaguely remember both of the earlier books as vaguely magical realism, and overall entertaining but Moonbound seems to be something a little different. The power of story and narrative is major theme, and it took me an embarrassingly long while to catch a key hint about the main narrative that may or may not be followed. Ariel is kind of a normal kid in a vaguely medieval fantasy village, but things change when he finds a dead girl in a space ship who has a talking sword, and her AI recorder decides to jump over to Ariel because it’s been stuck with a dead host for a verrry long time and is bored as heck. Eventually Airel runs afoul of the local wizard and has to go on the run, having various adventure, and finding an ally or two, and faces the prospect of maybe having to save the world from the dragons that humans created to save them but actually ended kind of almost or maybe actually getting rid of humanity. Guess where the dragons live and watch over things from? Yep, the moon. Someone will have to go to the moon to defeat the dragons. And maybe it’s all a big old allegory paralleling some commentary about the power of story along with the dangers of relying too much on certain kinds of tech.
For most of the story, the fantasy and the technology parts don’t quite merge all that well, but there is one plot-twist level moment that explains something big about the connection of ancient humanity and the dragons, and their conflict, which is also related to the magic system in the world. This works, and I didn’t see it coming, and it’s actually kind of neat if a little odd. The rest, I didn’t really get super into. The dialogue and general plot isn’t really all that attention catching, except for one part where I was strongly reminded of Book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels, except that Ariel doesn’t run into logical horses; it’s something else. I have no idea if that allusion was intentional, but I can’t unsee it, and I kind of appreciate it.
This is one of those books where it feels like it’s generally kind of average with some moments of brilliance, and that makes for uneven reading.