Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

This is the chapter book on the Library list, and the one that anchors the Chinese folklore shelf for middle-grade readers. Grace Lin — Taiwanese- American, a longtime children’s book author, a Caldecott Honor recipient elsewhere on her shelf — built Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by braiding a dozen real Chinese folktales into a single hero’s journey. The result reads like the kind of novel children have been quietly missing: a fantasy quest whose mythological vocabulary is not Greek, not Norse, not generic Tolkien, but specifically and lovingly Chinese.

The plot is straightforward enough to summarize: Minli is a poor girl in a village shadowed by an ill-fortuned mountain. She has been hearing her father’s folktales her whole life. She decides — and this is the small, correct, child-shaped decision that opens the book — to go find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him to change her family’s fortune. Her mother disapproves. She goes anyway. Along the way she meets a flightless dragon, a talking goldfish, a buffalo boy, a king who has lost something, twins, an inn-keeper grandmother. Most of the people she meets have stories of their own. Some of those stories turn out to be other stories she’s already heard.

The braiding is the craft. Folktales arrive at the right narrative moments, get retold, and turn out to be load-bearing later. By the end of the book, the reader has unknowingly absorbed a dozen pieces of Chinese folklore — the red thread, the Old Man of the Moon, the moon palace, the goldfish, the green tiger, the borrowed line about the mountain — and the novel resolves on the same logic those tales operate on. It is a book that teaches its own reading method as it goes.

Lin’s own illustrations are scattered through the chapters in saturated colour plates, which is unusual for a middle-grade novel and lifts the reading experience considerably. The book is also a comfortable read-aloud pace — about thirty short chapters — which makes it work for a family with mixed reading ages.

The best gift for an 8- or 9-year-old who has loved one of the picture books on this list and is ready for something longer. Pairs naturally with the Daoist sensibility of The Empty Pot and The Stonecutter, though the book is its own creature and not in any way a primer.