To the Sky Kingdom

I am aware about the plagiarism controversy swirling about this book, which is an unfortunate thing as the story is breathtaking. This review will only discuss the book's merits.

A word of advice - it's best to read this book after you have watched the 58-episode to series “Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms” as I feel the scriptwriters have done a good job restructuring the novel so that it has a more dramatic effect.

The novel is weaker because of two things: it's only told from the view point of the heroine, and I believe a romance novel is stronger and more effective if you have both the view point of the hero and the heroine. Two: there is lots of “telling” in the novel. Meaning, we have characters telling each other what happened - in other words, lots of information dump when it could have been fleshed out via character interaction, dialogue and action. The tv script managed to overcome the book's weakness to produce a truly moving tale.

So why read the book? It does give further insight into the story; there are many things that was merely alluded to or barely explained and the book fills the gap pretty nicely.

Now I am looking forward to reading The Pillow Book as the tv show has made me slightly curious of the side characters' love story.