"Third Moon Passing" by Rina Olsen is a mesmerizing blend of cosmic wonder and emotional depth. Its imaginative world-building and intricate plot make it a captivating journey through the realms of science fiction.

thank you to netgalley for the advanced reading copy. I really enjoyed this and will be getting copies for my shop.

Dnf at 5%. I tried really hard ti get through this one. Joweve4, it was confusing and jumped around and I literally had no idea what was happening, even this early on. The writing is weird and clunky and hard to get through or focus on. Maybe I'll give it a try again another day but right now, this is not a book for me.

I found this book to be very well-written and a lovely story! I loved the combination of real and fantasy, and rooted for the characters throughout. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a beautifully written and diverse fantasy world with riveting characters!

Thank you Netgalley and Publishers for the eARC of Third Moon Passing

I really thought this was written well and was surprised to learn it was written by a teenager, it certainly didn't read that way.
I loved the folklore throughout this novel and the characters are felt were created with a realism, the story building coupled with the world created all leaned to an excellent imagery.
I really enjoyed reading this book and look forward to reading more by Olsen.

I'm amazed that this was written by a teenager. It did not feel like it at all and I had a good time reading it. I appreciate the characters' list at the beginning, that's very useful. The folklore in this book was very interesting and we got to see different tales mixed in the main story. I love korean tales, history and folklore so this book called my name. I was a bit confused at times as some gods have small parts to play so I had to refer to the list at the beginning a few times. The parallel with the Americans invading felt slightly out of place, like a different story mixing in the main plot, so that's why I took off a star. I'd recommend this if you want to read more about korean folklore and history, and characters working together for a common goal.

This book is very nice to read! Olsen is a great and promising teenage writer. From the beginning, I enjoyed the story and learned about Korean folklore.

The minor complaint is the list of characters in the beginning kind of makes me feel intimidated because there are a lot. I think the list put at the end of the book will be better. Learning about characters through reading the story is better than that in my opinion.

But that does not hinder my overall enjoyment of this book. I believe this author will continue to develop as a great writer! I recommend this book for fans of folklore-inspired fantasy.

Thank you, NetGalley and Atmosphere Press for providing me with this eARC.

3 ⭐️

I really liked how the story uses Korean folk lore as its inspiration. It’s something that speaks to the author and has significant meaning. As a non-Korean, I felt a little lost. It was a bit confusing on how they were tying together modern events to the folk lore in the background and although there was a character glossary, I still would’ve liked to see more explanations of characters depicted throughout the story rather than having to go back and rely on the glossary. It was a cute story about finding your identity and being yourself, but the story tended to drag and became a tedious read. The conflict itself was not very interesting and it was confusing to switch back between essentially 3 character views when we don’t get much characterization besides the basic kind of stereotypes.

Favorite quote: “When you’re left in the darkness, you’ll do anything to get out of it. So either light a candle or go into a different, brighter room - find things out for yourself or let it be.”

I wanted to read this book, because I hoped it would be close to 'the girl who fell beneath the sea' , tho it has its charm, I'm not quite convinced about whether I like this book or not.
Objectively the book is well written and if you are looking for something without a lot of complications and headaches this is definitely what you should read.
It was worth the read anyway and I don't regret reading it.

Interesting premise and executed well. I think the author has great potential to do great things and just needs to keep going in the same direction :)

Usually I start my ARC reviews with a brief plot summary, but I don't even know where to begin. I suppose I'll start with the main portion of the story, as we see through Chansol's eyes for the majority of the time (although it's unclear if we're just seeing everything she is, but I'll get into this in a bit). Chansol is the daughter of the Hyeolgusan-shin (혈구산신), the god of the Hyeolgu Mountain. She, along with Moonsoo (문수), accidentally took someone to the underworld before his time, and now his daughter must partner up with another girl whose family has been cursed for generations in order to set things right.

I'm going to be analyzing cultural elements and language here, and while I am not Korean, I did major in Korean studies. I'm not an expert by any means, but I do know what I'm talking about.

I love Revised Romanization for Korean so much more than Mccune-Reischauer. It's just so much nicer. I liked that this book used RR. There were 2 instances where it wasn't, with the former more confusing and frustrating in my opinion:
Holangi, the tiger messenger. Tiger in Korean is 호랑이. In RR it should be Horangi. This is closer to the pronunciation. (In technical terms the r here is a flap, but that's a linguistic element that doesn't have much bearing on how it should be romanized)
Secondly, Yuhboh. 여보 is the word being used here, which is used between married couples as a sort of pet name, close to "honey" or "sweetie". It should be romanized as yeobo. I'm not sure why the author didn't romanize these two as they should have been.

Once the plot finally picked up, at the sixty percent mark, I enjoyed the book. But it was so slow and grating to get to that point that I nearly dnf'ed it. The only thing saving it was my interest in Korean mythology/history. People, gods, and what's going on was barely explained, and not enough information was given to the reader to allow for them to put the pieces together. It felt like this book combined three different stories into one, but none of them got the full treatment it deserved. It was very overcrowded.

I'd like to discuss how Neo-Confucianism is discussed in this book. For reference, I wrote a senior honors thesis on feminism in Korea, namely how cultural elements impacted the fight for women's rights. One of my major points was on how Neo-Confucianism was a sexist construct that harmed women. I say this to point out that I do have a fairly deep level of knowledge on this subject. At one point, Daseul's grandmother proclaims that she is a devout follower of Neo-Confucianism and as such doesn't support her granddaughter's calling to become a shaman. This book takes place in the mid-ish 1800s. Neo-Confucianism was THE system by which Korea was governed at this time. (Yes, Buddhism had its hold too, but folk religion was marginalized/stigmatized at this time, especially in urban areas). So the grandmother proclaiming this doesn't really make sense? It would be expected that everyone was to follow Neo-Confucian teachings in order to promote social harmony. Another thing is that Wolhwa "followed her father's counseling in Neo-Confucianism," but she didn't have a choice. The rigid social structures imparted by Confucianism wouldn't've allowed Wolhwa much wiggle room in general, but she was also expected to conform to the "Three Obediences" where a woman followed her father before she married, her husband after she married, and her son after her husband died. (this is incredibly sexist and so problematic, but I'm including it for relevancy). Again, since there was so much going on, this gets lost in the book, and if this had taken place several hundred years earlier, more could've been said about the battle between folk religion and Neo-Confucianism, and it would've made more sense in context.

The language is overly done in some parts, and there are poorly timed info-dumps that feel awkwardly placed. The characters didn't feel fully fleshed out, and I was quite confused if we were only seeing things that Chansol could see or not. Passages that were in third person would suddenly switch to first when Chansol showed up, which made it seem like she was more of an omniscient character, but then when she spoke and interacted, she didn't come across that way.

I wanted to love this book, but it had a lot of rough patches that needed to be smoothed out. It wasn't bad by any means, I just wish it had been more cohesive.

I don't know the myths this novel draws from, and neither am I familiar with the historical setting chosen to place this story in, so that allowed me to read it with a fresh mindset devoid of expectations. And I must say that, for a début novel, it's remarkably good.

But because it is a début novel, it also shows the usual rough edges for beginner authors, namely the pacing, which alternates between being draggy in some parts and experiencing a burst in others, and then the characters that tend to blend into one the further into the plot you get, except for perhaps the two protagonists, who are more distinctive yet not quite that well defined.

Yet it's a lovely story, entertaining and, despite its pacing issues, not a chore to read. I'm sure the crowd that are fans of Asian-inspired Fantasy/Hist-Fic will enjoy it far more, too, as well as the younger audience. Worth a try, in general, but especially when you're not in the mood for complications and only want a nice read for the day.

Third Moon Passing is the debut work by a teenage author and it certainly shows a lot of promise. I generally enjoyed the story, which was based heavily on Korean folklore and mythology, and it held my interest from start to finish. Two minor complaints would be that the characters' voices were not very distinctive, and with a large cast of characters this sometimes made one character blend in too much with another, but that is something I am sure the author will improve on with time and experience. Also, while the inclusion of full retellings of some folktales was perhaps necessary for readers not already familiar with them, for those of us who know the stories, it made the pacing drag as we paused to go through them, and the pacing overall could have done with some tweaking here and there. But that did not hinder my overall enjoyment of the piece, and I would certainly like to see how the author continues to develop. Recommended for fans of folklore-inspired fantasy stories. I am giving this book four stars.

I have very little background in Asian myth and folklore, but I usually enjoy books that draw on it, so I picked this one up. It's crammed with Korean folk religion and its gods, in the context of a historical expedition by the US in the late 19th century to try to break Korea's isolation and open it up to trade, so I feel like I learned a lot about topics I was completely unaware of previously.

Where it didn't work so well for me was that there were too many characters that weren't sufficiently distinct from one another, and that didn't give me enough in the text to tell them apart, either in their voices or with a few words of description scattered in to remind me of their uniqueness. In particular, there were a large number of minor characters who were members of the Korean pantheon, all of whom had long names that were sometimes quite similar, and if it hadn't been for the cast list in the front of the book I would have had no idea, most of the time, who each one was (not that it mattered a lot of the time; they were often interchangeable). Worse, I had to refer to that cast list constantly throughout my reading, even towards the end of what is a fairly long book, because they hadn't been made distinct enough for me to remember who they were without checking. Even the two young human women from very different backgrounds who play a large role in the plot were hard for me to keep straight at times, because their voices were indistinguishable.

There are tricks an author can use to give characters more distinctiveness: a couple of descriptive tags that recur (Roger Zelazny's method, which is highly effective), or a bit of backstory that isn't part of their role in the plot but just makes them a more rounded character, or the vocabulary they use and how they phrase things. In the case of the gods, even reminding us which one was the god of gates and which was the god of the Big Dipper a bit more often would have helped.

I felt, too, that the plot moved slowly, and obviously not because the characters were being developed; more because there were minor incidents narrated at length, and places described in depth, where more plot or more characterization would have worked better for me. This may simply be a matter of taste or style, though.

The narrative style is a bit unusual. There's a first-person narrator, one of the gods, but sometimes it's third-person narration of scenes in which she isn't present, but apparently is aware of what is going on because it is relevant to her interests - not omniscience, because there are things she doesn't know until other people find them out, but something akin to it. Just because it's unusual doesn't mean it can't work, and for the most part this narrative approach did work for me, but others may stumble over it.

I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley for review, and there may be more editing to come; the author makes most of the common errors, but doesn't make them constantly, so it's better than most, but it could still stand one more polish. There's at least one place where the wrong name is used for a character, and another where a punch turns into a kick, but otherwise the continuity is good.

It's a first novel, and it shows, but there's potential here if the author can develop her skills, especially characterization. It's interesting enough that I'm putting it on my Best of the Year recommendation list, though in the lowest tier.

The setting of the story was interesting. The way the book bounced around from scene to scene was disconcerting. I liked when it took a moment to breathe and really write about the setting, but it needed cleaner edges to the story because it just didn’t flow well overall.
I also wasn’t too impressed with the characters. Not bad, but also not memorable.

In Third Moon Passing , Rina Olsen presents a world where ancient folk tales become a reality, where gods and humans alike walk the earth, and where history can change its course with the flick of a dragon’s tail.

Excellent and refreshing. I can't wait for more books in the series.