by Mercedes Lackey, Michelle Sagara, and Cameron Haley
Luna (2010)
377 pages
As hard as I tried to avoid it, I ended up putting this book in the “Did Not Finish” category. I did read the entire first story and half of the second, however, so I thought it worth sharing my thoughts on it nonetheless.
Harvest Moon is a collection of three novellas from established fantasy writers. Each of them appears to connect to a world from one of their series, so readers who are familiar with those books may enjoy these stories more than I did.
The first story is A Tangled Web by Mercedes Lackey, which centers on the love story of Hades and Persephone. The supporting characters, Leopold and Brunnhilde, had been introduced in The Sleeping Beauty (Book 5 of the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms). Since I had read that book quite recently, I was able to get into the plot easily and enjoyed the way Lackey mingles the Tradition of the Kingdoms with the familiar tales of the Olympian gods.
I would actually give this story 3 stars, but the book as a whole did not measure up to the expectations set by the first entry.
I wanted to like Cast in Moonlight by Michelle Sagara; I really did. I kept picking the book up and reading a few more pages, hoping my desire to connect with young Kaylin Neya would overcome the lack of background information on the world she lived in. I just could not get enough of a sense of how things fit together or where things were going to enjoy reading it.
So I gave up on the second story halfway through and moved on to Retribution by Cameron Haley. Although we are given more of a sense of place in the opening pages of this story, I simply found myself uninterested in the characters or the plot, so I decided to call it quits on the book.
As I mentioned earlier, fans of these authors may find they appreciate the individual novellas much more than I did.
How about you, are there books you just could not finish even though you wanted to like them?
Note: This is Book #107 of my 2011 Reads (master list here).
I'm a mom with Asperger's raising an amazing son with autism, which means I'm basically the case manager/advocate/cheerleader/chauffeur. The rest of the time, you can usually find me with my nose in a book!
