Review: The Hunting Moon

The Hunting Moon by Susan Dennard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm gonna be honest, this one gets an extra star for cover love - seriously, that design with the hummingbird skeleton growing dangerous leaves and flowers has haunted me for months, ever since it was first unveiled. Helps that it reminds me a lot of the style of one of my old favorite 2000s YA series whose style Dennard has steadily emulated in this series - specifically, Lisa McMann's Wake trilogy.

But while Dennard's pretty well invested in her little ongoing "Sooz Your Own Adventure" experiment, now expanded from one Luminaries novel to a trilogy (and predominantly conducted on Instagram now because Twitter can go screw, eh?), I don't think I'll be continuing any further with this series. It just doesn't work for me nearly as well as The Witchlands, which - while I haven't had effusive five star love for it the way all the rest of the YA Cool Kids' Table always does - nevertheless invites me to reread from the beginning every so often, especially with the increasingly long wait times between books in that series. (If the planned final novel Witchlight makes it to publication in 2024 as currently planned, it'll have been a three year gap since its predecessor, a pretty long gap in the YA world.)

Sure, this book has its moments - I did like Winnie's thoughtful meditation on Luke breaking away from his training with Yoda, and how that made sure he never got fully subsumed in the light side to excess the way the most devout Jedi did, to the downfall of their entire order (Dennard must be a disciple of The Last Jedi as well no?) That part did a good job underlining Winnie's general disconnect with the rest of the Luminaries, because they still act so holier than thou even now that she's saved all their collective bacon once already.

But for its merits, this series is unhooking me as a reader pretty quickly, with its half-baked world-building (especially compared to The Witchlands) and the romantic leads Winnie and Jay both being tropes more than characters, with little in the way of believable chemistry.

I might still end up reading Book 3 if only because I do follow Dennard on Instagram for Witchlands news, and there might be updates about the presumably final novel in this series as well. But if I do so, it'll be with great trepidation - and the knowledge that no cover art could possibly outclass this one.

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