Harvest Moon by Krista D. Ball

THE PAGAN & THE PEN BOOK REVIEWS

Title: Harvest Moon
Author: Krista D. Ball

Author Site

Buy Link
Publisher:  MuseItUp Publishing

Genre: Romance, fantasy, Native American

Length: 35 pages
Other: No violence, sexual content or bad language

Reviewed by: C. LaForce

RATINGS FOR:

Cover: (3.5)  The cover is lovely, and I like that it is dark and focused on the individual as that matches my mental imagery of the story, however, the hands of the person in the photo are elderly and masculine. The story is focused on two young people. The elders spoken of most, are female. Minor detail, but irksome. It wouldn’t have stopped me from picking up the book though as I wouldn’t have understood the discrepancy until after reading the story.

Presentation: (4)

Editing: (4)

Story: (4) This is not my usual genre, but I enjoyed the story enough to re-read it.

Writing Ability: (4) “Harvest Moon” is the first story that I have read by this author.

Overall Card Rating: 

                                

About The Book:

Dancing Cat angers her Ancestor, whose harsh punishment teaches her that true strength comes from the spirit within.

Cursed, abused, and desperate to know her future, Dancing Cat sneaks a glimpse inside her tribe’s Sacred Bundle, a powerful source of spirit magic. Instead of the future, she sees her most powerful ancestor, Small Tree and incurs her wrath. Small Tree strips Dancing Cat of everything — her home, her identity, even her gender – and drops her in the middle of enemy lands.

Injured, and in a strange, new body, she is befriended by Bearclaw who is on a spirit quest. He offers her assistance and asks for nothing in return; a kindness Dancing Cat had forgotten existed. She struggles to weave a path around the obstacles of friendship, identity, and longing in order to survive her eventual return home to face even further punishment.

And she does it while wearing someone else's skin.

The Review:

It was dark and foggy and close. Or not. Perhaps that is not what the author intended, but in my mind’s eye, that is what I pictured. Rather than the warm fall sunshine that likely lit the setting of the first part of the story, or the bright white of sun on snow in the latter part, I pictured dense fog and darkness. Less weather, and more my own mental process of shutting out the rest of the world and focusing on the main characters. There was a world, with details, in which this story is set, and there were other important characters, but I didn’t care about them and banished them all into the haze. I found that the only thing important to me were the two lovers.

Dancing Cat was a young woman of her tribe, cursed by misfortune, not her own doing. In misery, she turns to the spirits of her people for an answer, any answer, or lacking a reply, she was ready to make her own desperate choice. Her answer is magical transformation, with a twist, and transportation that dumps her into the lap of another troubled young soul on his own spiritual quest. The beauty of this story is how these two unique beings, neither fitting in well amongst others of their tribes, find each other and fall in love. They discover in each other, matching needs and perfect soul mates. I hesitate to give more details of the story in this review as it is a short story and I might steal something away and spoil things for the reader. Suffice it to say that the first thing I did when finishing this story, was to turn back to page one and read it again. 

Pagan Elements: Spirit quest, magical transformation. Refers to Native American spirit magic.

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