Magic Moon
© Tokyopop
"Magic Moon"
By: Janet HouckDate: Wednesday, January 10, 2007
So far, TOKYOPOP’s Pop Fiction imprint for teens has been a hit with me. Kino no Tabi was amazing, and Chain Mail came out of the blue to quickly evolve into a truly engaging light novel. Magic Moon... didn’t follow this pattern. It’s a really insipid novel that I would have loved when I was in middle school, but it’s utter dreck for me now.
I guess it suffers from Master-Piecemeal Syndrome, where the book is amazing and great--as long as you’re not already familiar with the standard fantasy motifs that the story swims around in. Unfortunately, Magic Moon follows every single stage of Campbell’s monomyth structure, the archetypal hero’s journey.
The book opens with Kim, our young hero who dreams of sci-fi space adventures. Reading books instead of doing his homework, one day his parents come home early. Kim’s little sister, Rebecca, has fallen into a coma after a rather routine operation at the hospital. The doctors are baffled. Frustrated to see his parents so helpless, Kim wants to save his sister more than anything else. He meets a mysterious white-bearded old man who explains that Becky has been captured by the evil sorcerer Boraas in the land of Magic Moon, a fantasy world that Becky sometimes visits. In order to save her, Kim must travel to Magic Moon and into the Land of Shadows to rescue her from Boraas’ castle fortress, because apparently, only humans can cross the Shadowy Mountains that divide the light and dark sides of Magic Moon.
That hurt, just typing that up.
The rest of the book entails Kim’s adventures in Magic Moon, as he escapes Boraas’ castle dungeon, befriends a lake god/creature and his son, crosses the Shadowy Mountains while disguised among the army of black riders riding to invade the good guy’s turf, and befriends a giant, a giant disfigured black bear, a prince of a fallen land, and a naturally giant gold dragon. Kim takes off on a prophesized quest (foretold by Kim himself!) and disobeys the advice of Gandalf--the white-bearded old man who is the de facto ruler of the forces of Good, even though it’s explained that there are no kings in Magic Moon, because everyone lives happily in equality with each other. After having his friends picked off one by one along the way, Kim arrives at the End of the World, where after a duel with nemesis Baron Kart and tests of willpower and good intentions, he meets and gains the aid of the Rainbow King, who appears to save the day in true ex deus machine fashion. Except the authors decide to take a page out of Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series where it becomes known that everything has been according to Boraas’ plan, that Kim has been working for him unknowingly. Just like the aforementioned series, the bad guy is thwarted by a flaw in his own plan. I’m only revealing the ending because it really is a horrible ending that is tacked on at the end. At least the maniacal villian monologue kinda made sense in To Green Angel Tower. The last chapter is so Narnian with the brother and sister united and traveling around the restored Magic Moon, it was just painful.
If I hadn’t read Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Tad Williams, Mercedes Lackey, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Tanith Lee, Anne McCaffrey, Robin McKinley, Pamela Service, Tamara Pierce, Susan Cooper--even Piers Anthony--just to name a few of the writers whose works I devoured as a young teen, I would probably love this novel. It does pack a lot of action into a 350 page book, retailing at $10.99 US. It’s good brainless genre fun, although I’d pick better books if I wanted to rot my brain by the pool or in front of a blazing fire. Probably books from some of the authors listed above, as Lackey and McCaffrey slipped into mush pile reading material after I left high school.
I’m not really sure why TOKYOPOP picked up this title, as it really stands out in its poorer quality and in the fact that it’s not from Japan; it’s German. The real world scenes are set in and around Düsseldorf, and the authors are not drawing upon Japanese manga as an inspiration at all. This is as Western fantasy as possible.
For me, Magic Moon jumped the shark when Kim takes a Viper spacecraft to Magic Moon. Seriously. I’m not joking. Kim’s favorite sci-fi series is all about Commander “Arcana” and the huge Warlord II spaceship... with its Viper fighters. Did they have to bring Battlestar Galactica into this mess? Really? Just skip this book and read the original fantasy sources that this novel borrows from.
