I really enjoyed this one! Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee follows Hwa Young, a girl who was taken in an Imperial orphanage after her moon was destroyed by Imperial forces. Fueled by a desire to never be powerless like that again, she is determined to excel and become a lancer pilot in the military.

Hwa Young is stubborn, a bit judgemental and capable of quite a high level of self deception. In response to her whole family and moon being destroyed, she latches onto the Imperial way of life as a survival mechanism. She knows they do terrible things, like what they did to her moon, but she thinks she's safe as long as she's on the inside and loyal. She's not always very likable but I grew attached to her regardless.

A lot of the other characters rely pretty heavily on stereotypes, the rich bully, the tech genius, the class clown etc but they gain some depth as the story progresses. I can't say I'm particularly invested in any of them individually but I'm also not that sad about it as I liked them as a group. It was a fun, easy read and I appreciated that the focus was on friendship and relationships other than romance. It's also a queer norm world!

The world building had some particularly cool aspects. Gravity in this universe is generated by faith and rituals. It has some cool implications around too little/too much faith. There's also the fact that gravity from different beliefs systems clashes so in order for the empire to expand they must dismantle opposing ways of life.

The other aspect I liked was the lancers, giant battle robots which can fly through space and have mental connections with its pilots. The lancer we get to know best is Winter whose inner voice is cold and bloodthirsty.

Moonstorm is an engaging, young adult sci fi. The plot follows a familiar pattern but I still raced through it and am excited to see how things progress as the series continues. If you get frustrated with predictable plots this might not be for you. Otherwise stay for the interesting world building, the main character's inner turmoil and dramatic space battles. ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

Moonstorm is out June 6th, thanks so much Netgalley and @rebellionpublishing for the eARC!

Thank you NetGalley and Solaris for the opportunity of reading Moonstorm as an ARC.

This is the first time I've read anything by Yoon Ha Lee, so wasn't sure what to expect, beyond the plot sounding intriguing. I was pleasantly surprised to find the synopsis undersold the plot tensions. As others have mentioned whilst not tagged as being YA on Netgalley, it's writings and formulation to me felt very akin to the sci-fi young adult novels I loved to read as a teen and are still a guilty pleasure, where the main character feels like an outsider (very much the epitome of teenage angst) - different to those around her and set to shake the foundations of the civilisation she resides in to it's core as things aren't quite as perfect, with book 1 ending with the knowledge the clanners aren't quite so evil as it first seemed and that the empire had a world destructive mega weapon that relies on deaths of innocent civilians who support the cult of the empress.

I'd definitely recommend Moonstorm to teens as for me it feels like Moonstorm is the current teen generations hunger games.

first of all, thank you to the publisher and author for the arc.

i can’t lie. i’m disappointed. the synopsis sounded so good— i was looking forward to action packed scenes, internal conflict, suspense and mystery. i was looking for something that would make my heart pound with anticipation; something that would keep me turning the pages and finish this in one go.

what i got was a (in my opinion) poorly constructed book that took me ages to get through despite it being an anticipated arc. now, i’m all for asian fantasy / sci-fi. every time i see a book like that, i request it on netgalley. but the thing is, even though this book had all the things it needed to, theoretically, get me obsessed, it just didn’t work. let’s break it down.

moonstorm is the story of hwayoung, a “clanner”. when she was a child, her home planet was destroyed by the empire, but she was taken in by a lancer pilot— one of the few that had laid waste to her home— and brought to the empire. there, she grows up in an orphanage and when she’s of age, trains to become a lancer pilot. when danger comes and she has to step up for the role, hwayoung finds herself torn between her old identity, hwajin, and her new persona: that of the empress’ loyal soldier, hwayoung.

okay. so, good premise! very intriguing. fun and all that jazz. unfortunately, i did not feel that same feeling transferred over into the book. while it was fast-paced and relatively short, the plot was lacking. first of all- why does everyone seem to dislike hwayoung from the get go? sure, they mellow out as the book approaches the end, but it’s frustrating to read about hwayoung who does like, basically nothing but exist and bear the brunt of insults from both strangers and people who know her. she accidentally makes a mistake in training and she nearly gets JUMPED for it??? irrational.

second of all, i just didn’t think the book did a good job of setting up conflict and resolution. i saw that twist coming a mile away. and when there was conflict, it felt remarkably low stakes even though i knew it was supposed to feel exciting and nerve-wracking just because lee writes in a way that i personally find hard to keep track of. she’ll be doing one action then transition to the next so rapidly or unclearly that i have no idea what just happened. so, when i was reading this, i just went with the flow. evidently not that good of an experience if the flow of the book is incoherent to a reader.

third, i just wasn’t that big of a fan of most of the characters, either. hwayoung— she’s okay? most of her character revolves around becoming a lancer and her several ambitions, which, fine! totally good for a ya protagonist. but i didn’t feel connected to her that much, and i just disliked how she treated geum (who is, pretty much, the only one i like apart from commander yejun.) bae is just insufferable; i heavily dislike the trope of asshole character gets a pass for being an asshole for the whole narrative because they have some sort of troubled background. in this case, much like most other ya rival-type characters, it’s because of her mother issues. oh, no. that is so sad. i didn’t feel pity. i just felt that just because she has a troubled home life doesn’t mean she can be a terrible person to everyone else. who else is there to talk about…. seong su. well, he was okay. didn’t show up much. and i do wish mother aera and the other old clanners got more development, because she barely got SCRAPS.

speaking of the old clanners, though, i do like the register lee opened the book with, when the scenes with the old clanners on carnelian started. it was a very youthful sort of voice— naive, maybe? a tremulous sort of hope that comes through in what can only be a child’s point of view. i thought lee did a good job on portraying that cluelessness and naïveté in a child’s perspective, especially concerning adults.

i’m really sad that this didn’t work for me, because i feel it had a lot of potential just from the premise alone. while i do like lee’s writing style, like i’ve mentioned, it’s difficult to follow at times, and it just lost my interest during my journey through this book.

Moonstorm is a well written YA space opera. A young girl’s home is destroyed by forces of the Empire but she survives and grows up to become a lancer pilot for the forces who killed her family. The plot was fairly predictable for most of the book but did grow more interesting as it went on and I really enjoyed the last part of the novel.
The world building was my favourite part of the novel especially the part played by religion and gravity which felt really new to me
My main problem was that the characters all seemed very familiar, the mean girl, the techy wizard etc and none of them had any real depth. It was an enjoyable story but I wasn’t really invested enough in the characters to care about them that much.
The book isn’t labelled as YA on Net Galley but I definitely felt that was its intended audience.
Thank you to Net Galley and the publishers, Solaris for allowing me to read this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

3,5 stars

One of the things that I always appreciate about Yoon Ha Lee's work is that it has such big ideas with a variety of cultural additions. This book also has that. If it always hits the mark I sometimes wonder.

We meet Hwa Young when her planet is attacked by the empire. She is picked up as an orphan and taken in by the empire. She's being schooled and trained. She wants to be a lancer for the empire. But when the rebels attack this planet, her dreams move up quite a bit. She becomes a lancer. But that isn't nessecarily all its cracked up to be.

To start right of the bat with what I think missed the mark is that Hwa Young was already 10 when she was taken in by the empire. Yet when we meet her at 15, there is no hesitation. She is completely in support of the empire. While I understand 10 is still a child, one would have expected some negative notes here or there. They killed her family. She is very aware of her standing still. There is no suggestion of brainwashing at any point. It could have been a means of surival of course, but there is no critical note until the very end, and only for an action in that moment. And that made the impact of the ending not as hard.

Despite that I did enjoy reading this story. I did like Hwa Young as a character. She knows what she wants and will do anything to achieve that. She is desperate for approval (which is a little jarring in places because of the above.) It is very much young adult with the stereotypical rich girl bully. Yet Yoon Ha Lee manages to show things underneath the surface with her. I also appreciated the friendship Hwa had with another person, with its awkward teen communications yet they always managed to come back to their friendship.

Overal Moonstorm is not at all perfect. But I did find it an enjoyable read and I am looking forward to its sequel.

There's an early moment here that's very reminiscent of Lee's excellent, underappreciated Machineries Of Empire series, where it's mentioned that the Clanners among whom we open, and their enemies the Empire, have different laws of gravity in their territories, each maintained by different rituals. But the way that this leaves the supposedly more independent Clanners just as conformist as the Empire is only barely subtext, and the very fact that the Empire is called the Empire, and not something more interesting like Machineries' Hexarchate, feels disappointing. It's a disappointment which mounted through the third of this I managed, rivalries and divided loyalties that should have festered into something as delectably twisted as I know Lee can create instead proceeding along the most obvious Hollywood (by occasional way of fanfic) lines. Orphaned by the Lancer mechs that killed her Clanner family, Hwa Young is now a ward of the Empire and dreams of piloting one, but her spoiled queen bee nemesis - she's even called Bae - wants the same thing, and has all the social capital. Again, ambitious leads are familiar from those fabulous early novels, but here there's not much of Hwa Young on show beyond ambition, and as in real life, that's quite dull. The only time I was surprised by a development was when the Lord Of The Flies in space interlude was cut short sooner than I expected, which relieved me, because I couldn't decide whether to call it Space Lord Of The Flies or Lord Of The Space Flies; the former was giving me a Monster Magnet earworm, but also I do like that song. Alas, when the next phase of the story still failed to offer anything that hooked me, I concluded I should probably cut my losses. I'm sure there are satisfactions, creative and/or commercial, to this more straightforward YA SF approach, as against the gloriously niche Cordwainer Smith meets 40K deviations of Machineries, but I don't think they're for me.

(Netgalley ARC)

A solid, competently written YA book. It's hard to dislike it, but it's hard to praise it as something spectacular. The characters feel somewhat flat, the world easily digestible, and the plot pretty straightforward and unsurprising.

This wasn’t exactly what I expected it’s like the movie rebel moon meets Enders game, which I’m sure a lot of people will love but for some reason I’d thought out a whole novel in my mind only to find out that my novel and this novel were different. Shock horror.. I know.

Oh my God. I got the chills so many times toward the end of this book. It completely blew my mind. It managed to surpass my high expectations AND be nothing at all like I expected. I've followed this author's work since the start and am excited to see what else they conjure in the future.

I so fervently wish Yoon Ha Lee would once again come to write adult fiction, because this is where his strength is. This is my second attempt to try his YA, but alas with the same results: I feel that the YA sandbox is simply too small to let his strengths shine. Where Ninefox Gambit and the world of Machineries of the Empire was complex, twisted, and above else, delightfully surprising in its developments, these things somehow don't make it to his writing aimed at a younger audience. More is the shame.

But if one was to pick up Moonstorm without any prior knowledge of The Machineries, this is a perfectly readable YA SFF: nicely set up against non-Western mainstream culture, fun and accessible, but faithful to the genre conventions to a T. I would always upvote ownvoices and work by queer creators, but in this case, a part of me would always think "adult SFF by YHL was so good, though." 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

I'll say it up front: I'm an easy sell for this writer because I love his Machineries of Empire trilogy, so I was quite happy to request this one as soon as it turned up on Netgalley. I also liked the sound of the premise as well, even if it doesn't particularly do lots that's all that new - then again, a significant proportion of books (not just YA ones) don't really do anything new, so I'm not really sure why some reviewers are giving this book a kicking on that basis.

We first meet our protagonist, Hwa Young, when she's living with her mother on a small moon on the periphery of an ever-expanding empire. When she's orphaned, then taken in by an imperial orphanage, Hwa Young gets sucked into the imperial military and effectively brainwashed into wanting to serve as a lancer pilot (think mecha, much like Pacific Rim but with sentient mecha rather than co-pilots). Her biggest fear is that people will find out where she's from, doubly so when she gets her wish but then finds out the current enemy are her former people.

It's a solid YA book, full of teenage angst and (thankfully) to my great relief, no desperate insta-love subplot. This is the first book of a trilogy and starting to set up elements of the remainder of the books: the empire is testing a mega-weapon on innocent civilians, everyone now knows who Hwa Young really is, and so on. One small part of the world-building I particularly liked was the idea of faith as a mechanism for generating gravity, which plays a significant part in the mega-weapon subplot but also just seems like quite a clever idea.

I enjoyed reading Moonstorm, liked the pacing and the majority of the characters, and look forward to picking up the rest of the trilogy in due course.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via Netgalley. This is my honest review of the book in question.

That feeling you get when you read someone new and you are suddenly excited by the form and pop of someone doing something a little bit different. Ninefox Gambit was a space battle space opera, but had big ideas and a lot of maths and was perfect for me. Moonstorm - as its title might suggest - isn't quite so radical. Infact if it weren't for my previous knowledge of their work, I'd put this down as a competent but green young adult debut. It is still a space opera, set in a glorious Empire that our protagonist has been adopted into after her rebel moon is taken by the military when she was a child. But it comes off like an overeager fanfic adjacent run at Ender's Game, our orphaned lead Hwa Young ends up in military academy, firmly number two in her class behind the perfect, rich bully. She dreams of being a Lancer pilot, and a few coincidences and war escalation along, that's exactly what she becomes. There is a very YA sequence where the sentient Lancer ships have to bond with their possible pilots, Hwa Young goes last and just after another candidate has died in the process. Will she get a ship, will she bond with the mysterious but most powerful one? The thing is, this isn't a book big on surprises. If it teases something unusual, hard or exceptional, it will probably happen to Hwa Young.

There is something bigger bubbling underneath after all. Our orphan is desperate for the acceptance of her new side, and has so happily accepted that the Empire are the good guys that its quite clear that they probably aren't (its an Empire you idiot). So this sets up an easy reading trilogy, which I think I can safely map out from here. Its YA, you can happily play with some of the oldest tropes in the book. But I wanted something a little bit more like Ninefox Gambit.

Me ha decepcionada bastante la última novela de Yoon Ha Lee, no porque esté destinada a un público juvenil, porque por ejemplo Phoenix Extravagant me hizo más gracia, si no porque me parece simplona y previsible. Incluso el comienzo suena a algo que ya hemos leído del autor, ya que la premisa de que las oraciones y creencias de las personas alteran la gravedad en determinados lugares nos remite y mucho al sostén principal de la trilogía The Machineries of Empire, versión reducida y simplificada.


La novela sigue las peripecias de Hwa Young, criada hasta los diez años por los rebeldes, pero que acaba entre los imperiales tras un ataque devastador a la luna donde habitaba en el que pierde a todos sus conocidos. O eso creía ella.

A pesar de su orfandad y quizá como reacción a la pérdida de todos los que conformaban su familia, decide dedicarse en cuerpo y alma al imperio para alcanzar su sueño de pilotar un mecha (en vez de Soñando, soñando triunfé patinando… Peleando, peleando triunfé pilotando). Pero es que todo el libro es tremendamente previsible, desde la marca que le dejará su mecha para que se distinga bien de los demás personajes, no vayamos a confundirnos a su atracción / odio por su mayor competidora.

Me cansa mucho que se reduzca siempre el papel del hackeo y la infiltración en sistemas informáticos a un “don natural” que hace que con cuatro pulsaciones y dos clicks superes cualquier barrera. Es un recurso muy manido y muy poco convincente que por desgracia parece ser que ha venido para quedarse.

Las escenas de acción, son pasables como mucho, y las habilidades de pilotaje necesarias para controlar los mechas más avanzados del universo, prácticamente seres sintientes, son risibles. ¿Para qué necesita un piloto si lo hace todo solo?

Lo que si está bien representado es el alienamiento que sufre un representante de una cultura minoritaria cuando se ve absorbida por otra cultura, por más que intente adaptarse siempre habrá una dualidad en su interior que le hará sentirse extraño en cualquier parte. Eso creo que Yoon lo ha reflejado estupendamente, pero el resto del libro no merece para nada la pena. Una lástima.

I really loved the premise of this book and really wanted to like it but unfortunately there were just one too many things letting it down.

First the main character decides to join the military to turn against her own people and actively works hard so that she's picked to have the most destructive weapons. It just seems so strange and she barely seems to blink and eyelid at it.

Second the two main characters had a miraculous set of convenient skills which just didn't make sense. Why is a teenager better at designing computer systems than every adult? I think YA books need to have some kind of explanation as to why the adults aren't saving the world which this lacked.

The characters also felt a bit flat. It doesn't help that another, highly successful, YA sci Fi book has a crazy irresponsible pilot with her best friend engineer but they just felt very carbon copy in this book.

All in all, though I read the book and wanted so badly for it to work, it just didn't for me

3.5. I quite liked aspects of this and I'm intrigued enough that I will read the second book. Very cool world building, especially.

An exhilarating sci-fi adventure featuring a teenage girl striving to become an Imperial pilot. Hwa Young, once a resident of a rebel moon home, dreams of becoming a lancer pilot, an elite group of warriors who fly into battle using advanced tech. An attack on their boarding school forces Hwa Young and her classmates to be fast tracked to train as a Lancer. Amidst the whirlwind of combat preparations, layers of intrigue unfold as Hwa Young navigates through a labyrinth of secrets. She is drawn into a web of conspiracy that threatens the stability of their entire civilization. This journey compels her to weigh the remnants of her insurgent roots against an empire whose loyalty she questions.

Fans of Iron Widow and Skyward will be hooked on this adrenaline-fueled story, perfect for readers of all ages.

My thanks to Netgalley for providing me an advance copy of the book for my unbiased review.