With all the stuff going on about Tennelle flowers lately is this a safe place to say that clouded moon is just…not good? Because it’s not. And as someone with my own xenofiction project (which you can find shared scraps of over at @copiousamountsofwolves ) I was disappointed.
I finally got around to reading it, and here are some of my personal gripes.
It has its moments, but doesn’t stand well on its own, and according to the authors, it isn’t MEANT to, which is wild. Your book should be able to stand on its own. I shouldn’t have to read a bunch of supplemental material just to understand the plot and the characters.
Apart from a handful of characters most of the characters in the book literally never are given physical descriptions. We have no idea what any of them look like unless we look it up, and we shouldn’t have to! Goldenpelt’s character is all over the place to the point that it’s almost jarring to read when his thought processes shift. He seemingly can’t decide how he feels about anything or anyone, and not in a way that reads as some sort of inner conflict. It literally reads like the authors FORGOT how he was supposed to feel.
The POVs are jumpy and shift awkwardly in what’s probably SUPPOSED to be third person omniscient, but I…don’t really think the authors know how to write third person omniscient. They just kind of head-hop in a way that it’s really jarring and difficult to keep up with and there are so many characters (both POV and not) that just don’t really get fleshed out in a way that makes us able to care about them (especially when we can’t even figure out what most of them look like!).
There’s literally a scene where they’re supposed to be going on a journey, and we completely skip almost the entirety of the journey and an ENTIRE fight scene that happens on it. This is probably in response to how much people hate warrior cats traveling books but the reason people hate warrior cats traveling books is because they’re long and slow and there’s very little character development that happens in them. The response of that isn’t to skip over a journey and a pivotal moment within it completely and expect us to just be up to speed a brand new environment!!!
The concept is interesting. There’s promise for something that it COULD be, but it’s just not there yet. I was honestly disappointed, and I feel like I’m having a better response as somebody who did look into the supplemental material before I ended up reading it.
I got something out of it, but unfortunately it was an understanding of what not to do in my own work, which isn’t what I went in hoping for.
