Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee (Moonstorm #1) * *

Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee is a young adult space adventure that I wanted to love. I really did. I started it back in April, stalled hard, eventually finished it months later, and in the end settled on a reluctant two stars.

The premise hooked me immediately. A girl growing up in a marginal colony, outside the reach of a vast empire; an attack that destroys her life; an orphaned survivor who reinvents herself and aims for something dangerous and prestigious. Mecha pilots. Imperial power. Rebellion simmering at the edges. On paper, this is exactly my kind of book. And the early chapters deliver. The opening has momentum, emotional stakes, and a sense of place. I was invested.

Then the book shifts.

Once the story moves into training and institutional life, the tension drains away. The plot becomes rigid and predictable, and there is one extended section where you can see the outcome from kilometres away. It drags. It really drags. Page after page of waiting for the inevitable, wishing the author would just move on already. Instead of sharpening the conflict, the narrative circles it until all urgency evaporates.

There were also a few worldbuilding choices that constantly pulled me out of the story. One was linguistic. The use of zie and zer pronouns. I am not a native English speaker and I do not live in an English-speaking country, so my exposure to evolving language mostly comes from online spaces. I had only ever encountered these pronouns once before, years ago, in fan fiction. At first I genuinely thought they were typos. I have no issue with gender-neutral pronouns as a concept, but these felt oddly out of time and unfamiliar, and the text never helped anchor them naturally. Instead, they stood out every single time.

The bigger issue, though, was gravity.

In this universe, gravity is influenced by prayer. At first I assumed this was belief, indoctrination, maybe a cult-like interpretation of physics imposed by the empire. That would have been interesting. But no. It turns out to be literally true. Prayer affects gravity. And that was the point where my suspension of disbelief snapped. Giant robots in space? Absolutely fine. Futuristic empires and rebellion? Love it. But prayer-powered gravity crossed a line for me. It felt arbitrary, underexplained, and oddly mystical in a way that clashed with the rest of the setting. I kept wondering if this had roots in Korean culture that I simply do not recognise, but as presented here, it never worked for me.

The action sequences did not help. The space battles, in particular, were consistently hard to follow. I often felt lost and disoriented, not in a purposeful, chaotic way, but in a “what is actually happening right now?” way. Positions, movements, and cause-and-effect blurred together, and instead of tension I mostly felt impatience. More than once I found myself waiting for the battle to end just so I could piece together what had happened from the aftermath. In a story built around mecha combat and military conflict, that lack of clarity really undermined the impact of the action.

I also switched to the audiobook halfway through, hoping that might carry me through. Unfortunately, the narration made things worse. I cannot recall the narrator’s name, but her delivery was extremely stilted. A pause after nearly every sentence. A rhythm that felt chopped and artificial. She also sounded perpetually irritated, almost angry, which coloured the entire story in a way that did not feel intentional. Instead of tension, it created distance.

By the end, I could see the book that Moonstorm might be for someone else. If you enjoy military training arcs, rigid institutions, and speculative ideas that lean more towards the symbolic than the scientific, this could work for you. For me, the early promise never recovered from the mid-book slump, and the stranger worldbuilding choices only made that gap wider.

I finished it, but I never wanted to go back to it. And that, more than anything, explains the rating.