A review by shannon_magee
Seasons of the Moon by Julien Aranda, Roland Glasser

2.0

I was pretty excited to start this book. Some parts of it just sounded too good to miss. I'm here for a character that loves the moon and the ocean because, same. And the adventures Paul experiences could have been very interesting. But I could not get over the tone of the narration. And this may just have been something that was lost in translation, but a lot of it went back to that tired old creative writing workshop advice: there was a lot of telling and I'd prefer to have been *shown* some things. For instance, Paul keeps telling us how much he loves Mathilde, claims theirs is a great and beautiful love story. But why? What's her personality? We don't really get to know the characters for themselves, just the tiny adjectives Paul uses for them, so they wound up feeling really flat to me. Added to that, Paul's tone throughout seems so self-righteous. Even when he does things that are wrong and will hurt other people, he's somehow in the right. I didn't see Paul's flaws in action and the consequences of his actions (unless you count with his father, which I don't because Paul casts his father as the villain for the bulk of the story). Somehow, Paul is never in the wrong, never seems to admit a real mistake that forces him to undergo some earned pain and he doesn't grow as a consequence of his choices. His mindset never seems to be challenged, in a way that makes him doubt himself and question things and really change. And isn't learning through those doubts or overcoming them a part of living too? So Paul didn't seem as realistic and believable to me, because he didn't seem to really recognize his own flaws. And we're getting this story from him, in this state of constantly being on the moral high ground, which made the so-called "profound" observations sound preachy, adding to the frustration for me. Where was the tension? Where was the struggle and arguments between the characters? Show me the humanity of these characters so I can take a vested interest in these people! Otherwise, they feel as hollow as fairy tale characters preaching to the choir without feeling, without empathizing. The story was pretty, but with more substance it could have been beautiful.