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 feed the people there, causing Minli to develop a wish for good fortune. Much to the displeasure of Ma, Minli spends her precious money on a goldfish. It turns out the goldfish can talk when people want to hear it. She decides to let it go because of how bitter it made Ma. When she does so, the goldfish tells her directions to Never-Ending Mountain, where a wise immortal known as the Old Man of the Moon lives. According to the goldfish, the wise man can answer Minli's question on how to bring good fortune to her family and the village. The following day, Minli then sets out, freeing the goldfish so as not to burden her parents further, and leaves the village to find "the old man of the moon". When her parents find out she is gone, they try to look for her, but are stopped by the goldfish seller, who tells them to trust Minli. Meanwhile, Minli sleeps for the night in the forest, only to wake up to find a trapped dragon, which she saves. They become friends, and Dragon offers to be her steed for the journey, despite the fact that he cannot fly, unlike other dragons. Dragon also reveals that he was born from a painting and came to life when his eyes were painted. Along the way, they encounter selfish monkeys, whom Minli manages to trick into letting them pass, and together they enter the City of Bright Moonlight, where Minli leaves Dragon in a cave and takes refuge in a boy's home. The boy is poor and has nothing but a buffalo but helps her find the king, who possesses a borrowed line of text, which is essential to finding the Old Man of the Moon. She ultimately meets the king, and