The Floating World by Axie Oh – Book Review

Jul 18

3 min read

The Floating World by Axie Oh Book Cover

Book Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Series: The Floating World (Book 1)

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

Spice: Mild

Summary:

Sunho has spent the last two years in the Underworld – the dark, brutal, seedy city located underneath the Floating World – but doesn’t remember anything before that. Skilled with a sword and an inner darkness that he struggles to control, Sunho has been floating around the dark Underworld taking odd jobs and searching for his older brother, Junho. When he’s offered an outrageous sum of money and a lead on his brother from a mysterious military captain as a reward for finding a powerful girl, it forces Sunho to leave the Underworld in search of her.

Ren loves her life as a troupe performer with her adoptive family traveling the continent performing, hiding her inner light and her face behind her performers’ mask. During the troupe’s last performance of the season, a demon descends upon the village, wreaking havoc. When her beloved Little Uncle is grievously injured protecting Ren from the demon, Ren must use the power she’s hidden for so many years to save them both. Now with Little Uncle’s life hanging in the balance from the demon’s poison, Ren sets off to find a cure.

Ren & Sunho are on a collision course as they both go after their own goals, for little does Sunho know that Ren is the powerful girl he’s looking for, and Ren has secrets about her past she’d rather keep buried. When they team up, they’ll need to overcome the secrets and corruption surrounding them to save themselves and those they love.

Reaction:

The Floating World is a cute, exciting fantasy adventure set in a unique world with a mix of traditional and futuristic elements, loosely based on the Korean folktale “The Woodcutter and the Heavenly Maiden”. I’m a sucker for myth retellings, and I was really excited to read this book after reading the jacket summary. I was not disappointed! I thought the plot was at times predictable, but ultimately what was promised in the summary was delivered in a satisfying way. Ren and Sunho’s coming together felt like an inevitable force with the light vs. dark and heaven vs. demon motifs, but not in a way where there was insta-love or chalking everything up to fate. They still had a slow build up to their partnership, so I felt that was realistic.

One thing I absolutely loved was the contrast between the Floating World and the Underworld, and how the former always keeps the latter in shadow. The physical positioning of the ruling class above the working classes emphasized the vast differences in their situations in a way that was poignant. The politics between the two and the Sereniyan military were also interesting and something I’m looking forward to the second book in the series exploring more.

For me, there was just a bit of depth missing from the narratives that kept me from rating it higher. I felt that there were times I was missing the emotional connection to the characters; I logically knew they were experiencing an intense emotion, but I wasn’t feeling it myself like I do in my favorite books.

I would recommend this book if you are a fan of fantasies rich in setting and politics with a sweet romantic partnership, that is also a relatively quick read.

What I enjoyed:

· Even as the book is loosely based on the Heavenly Maiden folktale, that same folktale is popular and re-told by Ren in the book. Especially for a folktale that I didn’t know well beforehand, this helped communicate the basics of the myth in a natural way so that I could look out for how it was integrated into this story.

· I loved the symbolism of Ren’s mask and Junho’s scarf as they are representative of their overall journeys in the story. They both used the items to hide who they really were, and when they lost them, they were forced to show the other what they were hiding.

· Give me more Yurhee and Tag! Their dynamic is fun and curious, and they added some playfulness that I thought was missing elsewhere.

What I didn't enjoy:

· To expand on the lack of depth, I felt there were times when I didn’t understand the character’s motivations, and I wanted more detail into why they were making the decision they made. This lack of understanding created a bit of a distance between me and the characters that I didn’t enjoy.