Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

Lin, G. (2009). Where the mountain meets the moon. New York, NY: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Read on June 11, 2012. This book is a 2010 Newbery Honor Book.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a traditional folk/fairy tale about a little girl named Minli who is seeking to find out what her family can do to change their fortune. She sets out on a journey to the Old Man of the Moon, who lives at the top of Never-Ending Mountain. Before she leaves, she gets directions from a talking goldfish. Along the way, she meets up with quite a cast of characters reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz. There's Goldfish Man, Magistrate Tiger, Dragon, greedy monkeys, talking goldfish, twins named A-Fu and Da-Fu, and eventually the Old Man of the Moon. When you read this book, you will find that Minli makes a very unselfish decision when talking to the Old Man of the Moon and her family's fortune does, indeed, forever change.

Besides this book being an award winner, I chose this book because a student recommended it to me. She read it for Battle of the Books and loved it! I did not think I could ever like a book about dragons and Chinese fables. I was also a little intimidated by the sheer size of this book, but I am SO glad that I gave this book a shot because it was one of the best books I've read in a while.

I love how every tale that is told makes reference to something you read in a previous chapter, tying it all together to create a big picture at the end. For example, the story talks about an angry Magistrate who longs to be part of a royal family. The page in his destiny book told him that his son would marry a grocer's daughter. Since this was clearly unacceptable, he decided to kill the girl. We find out in a later chapter that the son did marry someone from royalty, but she had a strange habit of always wearing a flower on her head. When he questioned her about it, she told him of a crazy man who tried to kill her. When the girl's parents died, she was sent to live with the king, making her royalty but still a grocer's daughter. Guess who the crazy man was?? That's right, the Magistrate! There are many more tales like this one and all of them will have you saying, "So that's why the author mentioned that!".

The way the author uses descriptive language, lends itself to active reading the whole time (Fish), as they imagine how cold Minli is climbing the mountain, the sadness her parents feel when she disappears in search of changing the family's destiny, and the ladder that Minli used to climb up and see the Old Man of the Moon. Students, after having read the book, can illustrate one of the tales told in the story to help solidify what they read (Keene and Zimmerman, Mosaic of Thought).http://heavymedalbooks.blogspot.com/2012/06/where-mountain-meets-moon.html