What do you think?
Rate this book
The Size of the Moon
Autumn is a warrior living in a time when warriors aren't needed, except to dispatch the occasional strig - a deadly creature that feeds off the living. Part elf and part human, she's been seemingly content for hundreds of years. Things change when she discovers she has deep affection for Marcus...a human. And now his life is threatened by the rogue elf that destroyed her family.
653 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 1, 2020
2 people are currently reading
475 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 28, 2021
1.5
I have so many thought about this book, it's difficult to synthesize them into something cogent. But the one in the absolute forefront is, "Thank freakin' god, I'm finally finished!" This book is WAY too long. I mean like 2, if not 3 hundred pages longer than it should be.
After that is to wonder if, despite Michael's author picture, if the book wasn't really written by a 15-year-old boy—full of hormones, and fatally obsessed with guns and boobs. No? Are you certain? It sure felt like it. I think half the book is dedicated to describing different aspects of the female body—what it looks like, what it's wearing (miniskirts were very popular), how it's walking or standing or kissing or pressing its boobs against someone...again. It wasn't always about sex, but the female anatomy was practically a character on its own. And every single one of those female characters played to the exact same note. They all sounded the same, acted the same, dressed the same (again, the miniskirts), etc. Every single one, from the teenage human ingenue trying to seduce the hero to the 4,000-year-old warrior elf who successfully seduces him, were 100% interchangeable!
And I'd just gripe that Michaels simply can't write women, but his male characters are all cardboard cutouts too. Granted, he wasn't so determined they ALL throw themselves at the hero as the women, but they weren't exactly paragons of depth themselves. The hero especially. I basically hated the hero.
Here's the thing, he was a likeable fellow, loyal and brave and theoretically badass. So, it wasn't really him I hated. But it felt so much like Michaels couldn't imagine anyone but the (probably white) American Male as the hero that he convoluted the whole plot (set in Romania, among Romanians) to center on the least interesting person in the book. And I know some are reading this like, "what does him being a white American male have to do with anything?" I just mean that it's so often the default, and this book feels very much like it is focused on The Default because it's the default, not because of any considered reason.
At one point the hero leaves everyone he cares about behind to go off and fight by himself, thinking "this is my war." I thought it a great parallel to my experience reading the book. Because it very clearly wasn't his war. It was a war that started before he was born and would likely continue after his blip of a human life ended. And, while that could have been a really interesting theme to explore (American men's tendency to assume and act as if everything proximate to them centers around them), that wasn't the case. It was just Michaels forcibly centering the book on the American man, when the book felt like it would have been better served to focus on...hell, almost any of the other characters, but especially the 4,000-yearold warrior elf. Instead, she was supposed to be the most badass, dangerous elf in existence and Michaels immediately reduced her to a simpering, injured, sex-kitten in need of oh-so-important male protection on meeting the main character. Yeah, miss me with that caca.
Which brings me to a simple irritant. If you want your characters to cuss, then let them cuss. I got so tired of all the foreign words whenever a character cursed. I have no idea if it was an actual language or a made up one, but I hated it. It made the already stilted and barely tolerable dialogue even worse. That language was also really inconsistent. Sometimes the elves/dwarfs/etc talked in an old-fashioned manner and didn't understand sarcasm or a joke, and other times they spoke like modern teenagers.
Speaking of inconsistencies, Michaels had a habit of setting up dictates of the world (elves can only have one child each, mating is forever, whatever) and then breaking them. It made the world, and thus the plot hinging, on it untrustworthy.
All in all, while the ideas in this book aren't bad ones, it's not a good read. It's an especially poor read for any woman even remotely perceptive to the treatment of female characters or gender roles in fantasy. Perhaps Michaels thought giving women swords and telling us they are skilled would offset the cliched treatment, I don't know. I'll grant that Michaels allows no on-page rape (though it's insinuated that it happened in the past), there are some humorous moments (though not usually the passages played for a laugh, those were usually just too ridiculous to be amusing), and the book does have an awesome cover.
I have so many thought about this book, it's difficult to synthesize them into something cogent. But the one in the absolute forefront is, "Thank freakin' god, I'm finally finished!" This book is WAY too long. I mean like 2, if not 3 hundred pages longer than it should be.
After that is to wonder if, despite Michael's author picture, if the book wasn't really written by a 15-year-old boy—full of hormones, and fatally obsessed with guns and boobs. No? Are you certain? It sure felt like it. I think half the book is dedicated to describing different aspects of the female body—what it looks like, what it's wearing (miniskirts were very popular), how it's walking or standing or kissing or pressing its boobs against someone...again. It wasn't always about sex, but the female anatomy was practically a character on its own. And every single one of those female characters played to the exact same note. They all sounded the same, acted the same, dressed the same (again, the miniskirts), etc. Every single one, from the teenage human ingenue trying to seduce the hero to the 4,000-year-old warrior elf who successfully seduces him, were 100% interchangeable!
And I'd just gripe that Michaels simply can't write women, but his male characters are all cardboard cutouts too. Granted, he wasn't so determined they ALL throw themselves at the hero as the women, but they weren't exactly paragons of depth themselves. The hero especially. I basically hated the hero.
Here's the thing, he was a likeable fellow, loyal and brave and theoretically badass. So, it wasn't really him I hated. But it felt so much like Michaels couldn't imagine anyone but the (probably white) American Male as the hero that he convoluted the whole plot (set in Romania, among Romanians) to center on the least interesting person in the book. And I know some are reading this like, "what does him being a white American male have to do with anything?" I just mean that it's so often the default, and this book feels very much like it is focused on The Default because it's the default, not because of any considered reason.
At one point the hero leaves everyone he cares about behind to go off and fight by himself, thinking "this is my war." I thought it a great parallel to my experience reading the book. Because it very clearly wasn't his war. It was a war that started before he was born and would likely continue after his blip of a human life ended. And, while that could have been a really interesting theme to explore (American men's tendency to assume and act as if everything proximate to them centers around them), that wasn't the case. It was just Michaels forcibly centering the book on the American man, when the book felt like it would have been better served to focus on...hell, almost any of the other characters, but especially the 4,000-yearold warrior elf. Instead, she was supposed to be the most badass, dangerous elf in existence and Michaels immediately reduced her to a simpering, injured, sex-kitten in need of oh-so-important male protection on meeting the main character. Yeah, miss me with that caca.
Which brings me to a simple irritant. If you want your characters to cuss, then let them cuss. I got so tired of all the foreign words whenever a character cursed. I have no idea if it was an actual language or a made up one, but I hated it. It made the already stilted and barely tolerable dialogue even worse. That language was also really inconsistent. Sometimes the elves/dwarfs/etc talked in an old-fashioned manner and didn't understand sarcasm or a joke, and other times they spoke like modern teenagers.
Speaking of inconsistencies, Michaels had a habit of setting up dictates of the world (elves can only have one child each, mating is forever, whatever) and then breaking them. It made the world, and thus the plot hinging, on it untrustworthy.
All in all, while the ideas in this book aren't bad ones, it's not a good read. It's an especially poor read for any woman even remotely perceptive to the treatment of female characters or gender roles in fantasy. Perhaps Michaels thought giving women swords and telling us they are skilled would offset the cliched treatment, I don't know. I'll grant that Michaels allows no on-page rape (though it's insinuated that it happened in the past), there are some humorous moments (though not usually the passages played for a laugh, those were usually just too ridiculous to be amusing), and the book does have an awesome cover.
February 15, 2021
The Size of the Moon
This was an interesting story. Many battles were undertaken. Lots of character development. Living in the darkness and surviving the dreams.
This was an interesting story. Many battles were undertaken. Lots of character development. Living in the darkness and surviving the dreams.
May 19, 2021
Is it high fantasy or urban fantasy?
Very odd mix of urban and high fantasy. The novel is set in modern day Bucharest. But much of the action takes place in the mountains not the city. And we have elves, strigoi, and vampires. Oh my.
Very odd mix of urban and high fantasy. The novel is set in modern day Bucharest. But much of the action takes place in the mountains not the city. And we have elves, strigoi, and vampires. Oh my.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews