A review by bluestjuice
Sŏndŏk: Princess of the Moon and Stars, Korea, A.D. 595 by Sheri Holman

4.0

I'm really enjoying these Royal Diaries books, much more than I expected to. Sondok is written about a princess of Silla, an early medieval kingdom in modern-day Korea, and it is filled with carefully researched details and reasonable inferences about the life of this historical person. Her character's passion for astronomy is based on an astronomy tower she built early in her eventual reign as queen, and serves as an excellent focal point for the tension between Silla's culture and the adjacent Chinese culture that they are delicately exploring. As in The Lady of Ch'iao Kuo, there are romantic threads through the plot but they are definitely subordinated to other plot threads of politics, familial relationships, and culture.

I read this for Nell's Torchlight curriculum, and got through it quite a bit faster in part because it was a little bit shorter, and in part because I realized what a risk it was to get bogged down in it and made a point to keep moving through it at a good clip. It made for very enjoyable reading, though!