Reading Time: 3 minutes

Spoiler-Free Review

I’m a major mood reader. I was craving a fantasy with a badass female main character and romantic subplots, and When the Moon Hatched seemed like it might fit the bill. Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed.

Linked throughout are my discussion blogs where I expand on each of the topics more.

What’s When the Moon Hatched about?

An assassin finds herself swept up with a king from another nation, unexpectedly plunging her into the unknown mysteries of her past.

I loved the first 30%, then it lost me and the second half never recovered.

What I liked at first

I picked this up because I needed something fun and exciting, and the opening chapters delivered. I appreciated that I was dropped directly into the world and plot, with no info dumping, just some well-placed explainers to help me keep up without being too noticeable. It successfully immersed me. (There was a smidge of unnatural dialogue exposition, but I’ll always take that over info dumping).

On the worldbuilding front, I loved what this book brought to the table. Moons that are actually individual tombs for dead dragons? Lore involving gods of the elements, and fae with associated elemental powers? A planet which has one half that always faces the sun and the other half always in shadow? An organized “crime” syndicate that is really operating to oppose the king? Sign me up.

I enjoyed the first act.

What I didn’t like

After act 1, there was a lot of movement in general through the 30%-50% marks, which gave it some choppy pacing. It was a bit stop-and-go in terms of my overall intrigue. Then the midpoint got unexpectedly Gladiator…in a not so good way. It seemed out of place to me, and a lot of what happened in this section just felt unearned, so there was a disconnect between me and the emotionality of it. Even so, I was ready to forgive it for that, to be honest, if it had recaptured my interest after.

But it didn’t. The 50%-75% section felt like filler, and I couldn’t grasp the direction the story was trying to go anymore. There were no coherent themes tying the first half and second half together, and even though I’ve just finished reading it, I don’t think I could tell you what happened during this chunk of the book. The story was giving me narrative blue balls. (AKA, failing to make good on earlier Chekhov’s Gun moments, making plot points feel pointless in the grand scheme of the story).

Plus, by this point I was still waiting on the story to really deliver on the premise. For a book billed as a fantasy romance with dragons, I was expecting a lot more romance and dragons. And on the romance – the love interest really had no personality. I was waiting for him to be interesting, or for the two of them to be interesting together…and it never happened.

On the whole, the second half just had no propulsion, no mounting tension, no buildup toward a climax. Our main character was just…there. Nothing was happening. What’s worse is that there were a few other character POV chapters throughout this half that 1) I didn’t care about and found uninteresting, but 2) had no distinct character voice, so if I didn’t catch the chapter header, I legitimately had no idea we switched POVs.

There wasn’t even a climax. I’m so serious. We get a big reveal, and then it ends. It left me feeling like, “What was even the point of this story?”

Should you read When the Moon Hatched?

This is one of those reads where I could tell there’s a lot of great ideas, just not great execution. To be fair, I think this was self-published first, so it may not have had a team of editors behind it. So that said, despite being overall unimpressed, I felt the author really put her best foot forward with the first act. I will probably read book 2 in the hopes of getting more of that than whatever the rest of the book was – but if book 2 disappoints, I’m going to DNF.

If you’re looking for something to fill the void after reads like Throne of Glass (assassin main character) and Fourth Wing (dragons), this could be a contender. But, I don’t recommend it in general.