Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion

This is a Buddy Read for When the Moon Hatched by
Sarah A. Parker starting on March 5, 2025.


Happy Reading!

Thank you!

Only one book is out so far (2024 release), but next book has a date:
1. When the Moon Hatched
2. The Ballad of Falling Dragons (expected Oct 2025)

Apparently she's planning 5 books currently.

Oh, I keep wanting to read it, hope this makes me finally pick it up.

Yay! Welcome!

Currently on sale on Chirp!

Started this 'cuz I've got the book club for it tomorrow at 10am yay! It took a bit for me to get in to the story---the female narrator is a little more deadpan than I like, and there's a lot of disparate information coming from all sides, multiple chapters of different POVs but all in 1st person, and it makes me glad I have a physical copy with a cast of characters and glossary etc in the front of the book. About 30% I feel like I'm finally starting to get a handle on the different storylines. I can also feel the romantic tension, but it isn't making me eye-roll. So that's a plus! I'm actually kind of enjoying it. There's sass, but not stupidity so far. Fingers crossed! Worldbuilding is fun too.

Forgot about this buddy read. I’ll try to get to this one next.

Finished this on Friday and enjoyed it more than I thought I would! None of the characters are TSTL like most Romantasy I've read--though some have trauma that cause them to act in ways that make me shake my head at their choices. The sex scenes were verrrry explicit--but not like, emo? So I stomached it better. Though I still skipped most of them. I thought the twists were well seeded and nicely played out. But there is a LOT of information crammed in here... I think I'm definitely going to need a reread before reading more in the series. I'll probably wait until the whole series is out and then bug folks to read it with me.

The book club meeting yesterday--well, only half of us had actually read the book, lol. We're a pretty lax group. Those who read it agreed that it could use some chop-down editing--or been split into more than one book, or started in a different spot--but everyone enjoyed it. (view spoiler)[It took me waaay too long to figure out that the MC was also the diary-writer, but once I did, a lot clicked into place.

I liked Kaan and rather wanted to shake Reva to... something. Like, I get why she has the brick wall up. But denying truth doesn't make things less true, so I wanted her to move out of her denial phase faster. Especially after reading another book with amnesia in it (Parasite), her complete denial that she was another person once kind of got annoying. Just because she was that person doesn't mean she has to be her now--but she can accept that she was and move on.

There were a lot of scenes that made me go grrrr! and then had some good comeuppance--like the time when Reva escaped and ended up facing a gladiator tournament to keep her from being forced to marry. But that was also one of a lot of threads that felt kinda dropped--or hopefully will come back around later. That was one thing we talked about in the club--that if this was GRRM, we'd know that everything was important. In this book, there's so much introduced, and not revisited by the end of the book--it's hard to know what is important and what not.

I feel like on audio it was especially difficult to keep track because the female narrator was rather inconsistent. Sometimes monotone, sometimes enthusiastic, it was hard to tell who she was speaking.

Discovering that old Reva had entered into a marriage she didn't want while carrying Kaan's love child... The book club wondered if Kaan knows? One of them found a quote that suggests he at least knows she had a daughter--"There's someone whose life will be even more changed by your return..." or something like that. Whether he knows that daughter is his is another matter... (hide spoiler)]

I’m about 40% in and this might be a dnf for me. I hate spoilers but I opened yours to see if it’s worth continuing and it made things better but not much. Rave, or whatever her name is, just annoys the heck out of me. She’s too stubborn for common sense. I’m going to try to power through but I might need to swap for another book to give me a breather.

Yeah, her constant wall against others' suggestions was fairly grrr, but I was ok with the explanation for it. Audio also helped, since it forced me forward.

it was better than I expected. but it felt more like i was reading a second book than a first book of a series. it was good enough I am planning at least reading the second book to see if the author's writing get any better.

It's interesting--in some ways this feels like a first book by a new author--but she's an established romance author. this was just her first foray into fantasy. A lot of folks in my book club thought this was her debut, period. I guess it stretches new muscles?

I’m proud of myself for finishing but it was not for me. There wasn’t anything specific I didn’t like. I just couldn’t connect to the MC and I feel like the author tried to do too much with the world but didn’t really accomplish any of what she was going for.

I can see that. It definitely felt messy.