In some ways, it’s a Baz Luhrmann-esque comedy of manners that leaves you checking the assumptions that you bring to any social interaction.īut it’s also a war story. Much of the book is about culture clash, particularly between the rough lifestyle of the bandits and the refinement that the nun was used to before she had to leave. After she is fired for making a scene, she goes off with these bandits, rogues and thieves in a war-ravaged land. This scuffle involves a rowdy customer, a server who used to be a nun, and bandits who coincidentally are on wanted posters by the local government.

The story starts with a time-honored beat in the fantasy genre: a scuffle in a tavern. Having learned this, some of the elements of this novella make more sense. The author’s own site says that it is based strongly on the Malayan Emergency, when the British, the country’s colonial overlord, brutally crushed an uprising of the Malayan Chinese community with a combination of land reform and concentration camps (in the Boer War sense, not the gas chamber sense). Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy or maybe Avatar: the Last Airbender. The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is an Asian fantasy reminiscent of R.

I’m reasonably certain it falls under the ‘novella’ category. In any case, I read it, and I didn’t regret it.Ĭho is a Malaysian writer now living in Britain this is her first book that I’ve read. I found this book in a local library and picked it up only because I had heard the name ‘Zen Cho’ somewhere maybe I’ve read her short fiction in one of the magazines to which I subscribe.

Zen cho order of the pure moon