Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin is a book that feels like a grand old fairy tale.  Written in a simple style and interspersed with several short stories based on classic Chinese tales, Mountain tells the story of Minli, a young Chinese girl living in the Valley of the Fruitless Mountain.  Minli lives in a small hut with her mother and father, eking out a living growing rice in the fields around her village.  Inspired by her father's fantastical stories and her mother's growing dissatisfaction with their poverty, she sets out on a grand adventure to meet the mythical Old Man of the Moon and ask him to change her family's fortune.  Minli's adventure is fraught with danger and magic, and when she finally reaches the end of her journey, she must make some difficult choices about what truly makes families happy. 

Mountain is a Newberry Honor winner, and it richly deserves the award.  Everything good is squished onto its pages; imagination, kindness, generosity, friendship, and sacrifice are all present and characters are rewarded for demonstrating them.  Minli has a strong sense of right and wrong and acts accordingly.  She is a character that is good because that is the right way to be, and instead of this making the story flat, it imbues it with a sense of wonder.  This is light reading to be sure, but like any good fairy tale, it takes you away to a world where things are fantastic and crazy, but governed by universal truths that make sense.  Kindness is rewarded.  Evil is punished.  It's nice to visit a place where the world operates with those rules.

Coming off of reading Seveneves, a novel that was essentially joyless, I needed Mountain.  This book made me happy. While this was written with a middle grades audience in mind, the messages contained in its pages are timeless. In fact, you could make the argument that the themes present here could have a larger impact on adult audiences, who have so often seen bad behavior from others that they have become too used to it.  This is a children's book the way children's books are meant to be - simple, magical and happy.  This is a perfect bedtime story book and one that would strongly recommend for young readers and older readers looking to indulge in a bit of wonder.