"Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" by Grace Lin

Remember how I complained a bit about Tikki Tikki Tembo? This book is like that book if it had some actual depth. And was about a hundred times as long. And also had an entirely different plot. So really they're just both set in ancient China and told like folktales.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is about a girl named Minli, who probably isn't twelve. She and her parents are literally dirt poor, so she embarks upon an Epic Quest to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him how to change their fortune. She meets various other characters along the way, including a dragon, who's featured on the front cover.

There's also a subplot slash backstory involving a power-hungry magistrate who eventually became a power-mad magistrate, then died |and turned into an evil supernatural tiger|. That backplot was woven into the story with much better execution than the Saga of Phoebe Winterbottom and the Lunatic who Wasn't was in Walk Two Moons. It was almost like this book had one plot that's just kind of tangled and complicated and that gets revealed in a long and slightly fragmented way, rather than two plots that are almost entirely divorced from each other.

I should probably include here the same disclaimer that I did in Tikki Tikki Tembo's review, that being that I don't actually know very much about ancient Chinese culture. So I'm probably not a very good judge of how accurate this is to actual Chinese folktales. However, this does seem pretty similar to the other ones I've read.

[EDIT: Forgot to mention that this review is part of my first completed quest.] 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. There's a scary bit with |the evil supernatural tiger|, but I think kids would be able to handle that.

4 stars.

(Endnote: There are actually a lot of mountains on the moon. This book is about none of them.)