Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a fantasy-adventure children's novel inspired by Chinese folklore. It was written and illustrated by Grace Lin and published in 2009. The novel received a 2010 Newbery Honor and the 2010 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature. It has been translated into Chinese, French, Hebrew, Romanian, Korean and Slovene. Plot By a bare mountain, where the Jade River runs through, lies a poor, mud-covered village known as the Village of Fruitless Mountain, where the protagonist, Minli lives. Minli is a young ten-year-old girl with a fast and eager spirit, and is constantly ready for adventure. However, what she especially enjoys are her father, Ba's stories, which are often told at the dinner table. Minli's mother, Ma, instead despises the stories that Ba tells, feeling that they are simply "nonsense." Also, she is full of bitterness and resentment due to their poverty. All of the villagers, along with Minli's family, are also very poor, as farming is difficult in the hard and dry land due to Fruitless Mountain being the broken and lonely heart of the immortal Jade Dragon, a dragon that once brought rain to the Earth. Plus, there is barely enough rice to