Pangu's Shadow

"Everyone thinks they know what's best for the moons. Schoolkids, senators, farmers, factory workers. But so many of them disagree in their answer to one question: Who's human to you?"

Ver and Aryl work in the same science lab, when their mentor, Cal, is mysteriously killed in a variation on a locked-room mystery. The two girls are framed, when neither of them are the ones who did it. Despite being from very different backgrounds and not really knowing the other all that well, the two band together to clear their names, but end up becoming closer as well, as they navigate Ver's wasting disease she was attempting to cure, and Aryl's dream of being a dancer.

It wasn't a bad book, but I felt like it was lacking something to make me feel more for the characters. Ver's chapters, in particular, are written in a certain style to drive home that she's from a different background with different views. I like the science-y factoids/ruminations her chapters open with, but the rest of her chapters were very clinical, like how someone deep in the science world would think. Aryl, in contrast, is very flip, unpredictable, and kind of a party girl in the beginning, despite having lofty goals for herself.

I feel like the relationship that develops between these two needed more time to cook for it to feel authentic. As it is, beyond a few throwaway lines about being impressed by the other, noticing the other being a bit attractive, and silently respecting the other's intelligence, nothing is really expanded on until a switch flips and they're overtly in love with each other. It all felt very instalove-y, which was a bit grating.

Finally, while I liked the undertones about social divides and living with disability in the beginning, it felt increasingly heavy-handed as the book went on. The author has talent in painting the world this book exists in and the society issues it has, but what started subtle and left to the reader to infer ended as a blunt hammer to the head by the end, and I kind of didn't like that.

Still, it was a bit cute, and I did really like the world as depicted by the author.

This was an engaging read that kept me on my feet from start to finish. I'm glad that I heard about this book from Instagram, and as someone who is a queer and disabled Asian-American woman in STEM, I can painfully relate to some of her experiences. I never did a PhD, but some of the things she wrote in her book hit home for me.