Killing Me Slowly

Two Moon Princess is one of those books that I wasn't initially sure what to make of, mostly because I wasn't - and honestly am still not - quite sure of what it was trying to be. Or do. And though by the end I did finally suss out what it was trying to say, three hundred or so pages of dumb and unlikable characters doing dumb and unlikable things had worn my patience with the story too much to care.

My first and biggest problem with Two Moon Princess is this: I have no idea what age group it's intended for. When we start the book, our heroine, Andrea, is supposed to be fourteen years old, and even then, she reads at least two years younger. She's immature, thoughtless, and absolutely oblivious to the world in a way you wouldn't expect any fourteen-year-old girl, much less a princess, to be. But it gets worse - we fast-forward through about a year in the first quarter of the book, putting Andrea at fifteen when the story proper begins, and once she makes the inevitable cross over from her world to ours, it's revealed that time passes differently where Andrea comes from, and that her true age is seventeen.

Seven-fucking-teen, and this girl has all the emotional maturity, understanding, and depth of a child half her age. I seriously just gaped when I read this, because the only way I'd been able to excuse the preceding crapload of one-note characterizations, shoddy storytelling, childish actions, and whiny, annoying heroine was by relegating it as "for kids".

But then Andrea crosses into our world, and all of the sudden this JF novel has YA aspirations, what with Andrea suddenly being seventeen, and caring about boys and clothes and dating...

Read more at You're Killing.Us.