review – The Constellation of Moon

Moon Reads: Eat The Ones You Love

Posted on March 20, 2026

Eat The Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin

Rating:

Nothing is perfect, and as such, the reviews in this blog are chaotic. My main aim is to share my thoughts, joy and opinions on a book, not make a publication perfect review. This blog endorses authenticity, showing up and joy over perfection.

I think Griff (Sarah Maria Griffin) is one of the few authors that can get me to enjoy horror. I don’t read a lot of it and it is not a genre I pick, but for me, her books remind me in some ways of Latinamerican authors (I know, I know she’s Irish) with that magical realism, but with an added dollop of creepy (and thankfully without the misogyny).

Eat The Ones You Love is about malls that are dying, and about plants and loving others. I remember when I was a teenager there weren’t enough malls initially, the only one to hang out was an old one made for more “adults” with shops that were more utilitarian, like camera equipment, and haberdashery and so forth. And then they opened a new mall with a cinema and all fancy shops including a Sears and a Liverpool which were like fancy department stores. It was the place to hang out during your weekends or Friday’s after school. All the cool ones did. And then there came a third mall, that was in the rich part of the city, which meant a majority of the shops were high end so as a teen you would go and dream of being rich in them. But, many years later, I’ve back to all 3 malls and they’re not as busy, shops closed and it feels more like ghost town.

Why am I telling you all about my teenage mall adventures? Because I remembered them while I read this book. It was a piece of nostalgia, it was going to the cinema and coming out late once everything had closed and wandering the mall half lit and so quiet to get to the entrance. And maybe some readers will have no idea what that feels like, but then please read this book because that feeling was captured here incredibly well.

Now, I have never been a florist and I am not that good at keeping plants alive, but a family member was, and I have seen her make bouquets, so I cna also say that the flower shop was wonderful to read about.

So, now that the nostalgia revival has gone through, what is the story about? We have Shell who has “failed” at life and has to start again and so the possibility to work in the mall and the flower shop open her to knowing Neve, whom she finds very attractive. But she also finds the flowers and the life in the mall to be a good change for her. But there is something else lurking in the mall and the flower shop. Baby. Baby is an orchid with a taste for human flesh and also their feelings. It almost feels like hungry to be loved, hungry to feel and to feed on those feelings.

The story is creepy and intoxicating and it is interesting to read. If you’ve read previous works of Griff then you will know the type fo emotion heavy writing that makes you feel things intensely and so be prepared for it.

Gaming

Moon Plays: Sea of Stars

Posted on September 9, 2025

Sea of Stars main art from the Press Kit. Art by Bryce Kho.

At some point I had planned to also review and talk about (video)games I enjoyed playing, and yet it felt daunting to do so knowing I do not live up to more mainstream and established reviewers. But some games live rent free in my head and I wanted to share with you about them.

I bought a copy for myself on my Steam Deck on sale after playing the demo and enjoying it enough. According to Steam, I spend 40.4 hours on it (most of it on the main game and a few hours on the DLC), and I have managed to get 31 out of 54 achievements. I was not achievement hunting so this was mostly through just playing the game and trying to complete it.

I am usually picky with my RPGs, particularly ones that are turn based and JRPG. I don’t play many nowadays, since they tend to be very difficult, require too much brain at times and not be engaging enough or be too slow. But Sea of Stars, had probably one of my favourite features, that through acquiring items you can modify how combat and gameplay happen to your preferences in very specific ways. This meant that I could immediately tell it that I wanted to recover to full health and stamina/magic after every combat ended successfully. This made all the difference.

So let’s cover all the usual points of games, starting with:

Combat

I hate having to worry post combat about not encountering new combat (the whole “oh no, I have fought 10 Pokemons in my journey to the next town and my party is about to be wiped and now another one just jumped on me out of the grass, oh hell” vibe is part of why I don’t finish Pokemon games or do so very slowly or without spending extra time on them). So having a way to just hit the next fight on a blank slate and keep levelling up helped a lot. There a few other modifiers you can add, like making the cooking dynamic a tiny bit quicker and a few others. I would try most of them (except the ones that made combat harder) and then decide if I wanted to keep them on or not, because it is extremely easy to toggle them on or off in your inventory.

Combat is true to a turn based RPG and you get the same experience but smoother that you would get in classic RPGs. You can play 3 characters max on the ground but easily swap them during the turn to create combos and ultimate. They interact well with each other and I kept the two main characters on as main fighters for most fo the game. Experience is gained amongst the team regardless of if you used the character or not, which is also great. Hate having to grind all the party just to get them to similar levels.

For me the combat was accessible and good. Enough of a challenge, but with good modifiers that made it easy enough to be enjoyable.

Art style and Aesthetic

This is a massive winner, I am in love with Bryce’s art and the old style PRG vibes are immaculate but with all the modernity and years of expertise added to them. Love the colour palettes of different places, the thematic vibes for each island and area, and even for each character. It was incredibly satisfying and I even ended up buying the art book because I love the art and style so much.

Plot and story

One thing I actually enjoyed a LOT about this, is that there was zero romance in it. It is a story of friendship, of children who love each other and grown to support each other, and they also fight evil and hope for a better world. And you get wholesome relationships between the characters, with each having a unique personality, unique challenges and ways their story comes through in their items and plot. I cried, I hoped, and I was with all characters all the way. It was just so beautiful and kept me engaged and I kept wanting to known more of their backstory. The story goes both fast and slow, and the progress can feel a bit grindy (but when doesn’t it in an RPG? This is what kills me from Final Fantasy games, they take forever).

Gameplay and overall feeling

This game reminded me of the joy of playing RPGs, and it took away most of the frustrating parts of it. It still has a lot of puzzles, many many fights (though as you revisit areas and level up, the fights end faster or you can completely skip them with new abilities) and some interesting abilities.

I had like zero strategy on how I levelled my characters up, so the builds were simply by “hey I think this will do well here because this characters is suffering from this” or “hey I use this character a lot to do this type of attack, so might as well buff that attack type”. It felt approachable and it worked. I didn’t need to read up several guides to be able to make my party well rounded and working to defeat enemies. I could you dive in, so I stayed in the game and played and played (40 hours of it).

I enjoyed it until I completed the main game, but I did get a bit overdone with it by the time I approached the DLC, and so I paused that, because the mechanics changed a bit and I just had played too many hours of it, to devote time for it, but I still wanted to give it a fair go once I have completed other games in between to give me a fresher mind.

Overall, it genuinely was so accessible, kept things fresh and has immaculate vibes. I want everyone to play this, particularly if you ever played old pixel graphic RPGs. Plus we have a sun and moon character, a wonderful best friend, an enigmatic ninja, a mysterious pirate captain and her odd crew, and a few other characters who have a lot of story to tell.

And even better, I actually stayed engaged and completed the game. It was that enjoyable that I played it end to end.

Book Review

Moon Reads: The Principle of Moments

Posted on March 21, 2025

The Principle of Moments by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Rating:

Disclaimer: Receiving a review copy from the publisher does not affect my opinion of the book. If you think I review it highly it is due to me knowing my taste well and therefore not requesting books I won’t enjoy. And I am not obligated to review the book if I do not like it, so you may not see bad reviews due to me preferring not to hype down a particular book. I only do reviews of books I disagreed with if I think it is worth bringing a topic or warning to light.

I actually can’t remember how I came to have a proof copy for this book, since I know it was not one I requested, so it either came freely from publisher or through BlackCrow (who are awesome with proofs).

As you may have seen from the previous post, I also have a hardcover copy of it but I read it on the proof copy.

Now, this si one of my lowest-rated book reviews in a while, and the main reason for it is that this book needed more editing and more work. It is a book written during school by the author and then reworked, and it shows as you read through it. The characters are wishy-washy and feel shoehorned into making the prophecy work (the prophecy parts were probably the most interesting). They just seem to be carried forever by the plot to make the plot happen while trying to figure themselves out, and not in a good way.

The format of it, with the prophecy, the time travel, and the trying to make reason of the side plots, was interesting and had a lot of potential, but for me, it falls flat. I did not care for most of the characters except George, who felt like he had just been dragged into this nonsense and had no choice (see? Everything is very much an “I have no choice but to do this” all over the book), so our two main characters in themselves are flat and boring, plot puppets overall to fulfil a prophecy and you could swap them for other characters and still get the same story.

The premise is that there is this prophecy about 3 parts of a story, and you are having that slowly told (the people talking of the prophecy talk about the person who made it, and make notes on it and therefore this was the most interesting part and you could read just the bits of the prophecy and get a decent story, skipping more than half the book, way more enjoyable) but you also get several points of view by a variety of characters on how they are going to save the world, or maybe just themselves because they are selfish and want to live and yet they are cowards and nothing like what they are supposed to be.

The overall summary is that this had potential, had an interesting idea, and formatting and the “prophecy” part was pretty decent, but the execution fell flat and steamrolled through the characters just to fit the prophecy and “plot”, and it could have been done better. They deserved better.

Book Review

Moon Reads: The Truth Project

Posted on November 25, 2020

The Truth Project by Dante Medema

Rating:

This book was provided to me as a gift from the publisher. It was one I requested since I wanted to be able to review it. The fact that the book was provided by the publisher doesn’t inform my review of the book. All views here my own.

I picked the Truth Project since I have been reading a lot of fantasy and middle grade or graphic novels, so this felt like a good palate cleanser of a read and it was the perfect book to read while in a cosy bath. If you like The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, then this is definitely a book to read as it is also in verse style.

Cordelia is aceing high school and ready to go to university, she just needs to get her project sorted which she chooses to tackle a genetic test and the concept of identity through poetry. For that, she is paired up wiht the troubled boy Kodiak. It should be an easy project writing about what makes you you and what effect genetics have on it, or at least that is what she thinks will happen. But when the test results come through, her truth isn’t exactly what she thought it was, the person she calls Father isn’t her biological father.

This defintiely throws Cordelia in for a spin and her perfect record suddenly doesn’t matter as much, when it feels like everything she knws is a lie. We get the story shown as she grapples with her identity, trying to decide if she wants to meet her biological father and figuring out what she thinks about who she is and who her family is. Through her poetry, text conversations with her best friend and Kodiak, and a few email exchanges, we get a very dynamic story.

I really liked the format this was being worked with, it isnt just poetry/verse but also texts and emails, with different language depending on who Cordelia is talking to. And it was interesting to see how she tries to navigate her new truth and what it means for her, and the lies she wants to believe or the ones she starts making up to cope with the truth.

As you may know, I am not big on contemporary, usually quite picky on it, but this one won a space in my reading due to how it explores identity, family, being troubled, making mistakes and the concept of what is true and what lies one can believe or deal with.

Also, bonus points because her family is there and not just thrown around conveniently. I also could see glimpses of what her parents are actually discussing but that she doesn’t realise where things are going or how they are happening and instead interprets differently. But it was fascinating to see the layers of thigns even through her verses.