by Axie Oh
publisher’s synopsis
Sunho lives in the Under World, a land of perpetual darkness. An ex-soldier, he can remember little of his life from before two years ago, when he woke up alone with only his name and his sword. Now he does odd-jobs to scrape by, until he comes across the score of a lifetime—a chest of coins for any mercenary who can hunt down a girl who wields silver light.
Meanwhile, far to the east, Ren is a cheerful and spirited acrobat traveling with her adoptive family and performing at villages. But everything changes during one of their festival performances when the village is attacked by a horrific humanlike demon. In a moment of fear and rage, Ren releases a blast of silver light—a power she has kept hidden since childhood—and kills the monster. But her efforts are not in time to prevent her adoptive family from suffering a devastating loss, or to save her beloved uncle from being grievously wounded.
Determined to save him from succumbing to the poisoned wound, Ren sets off over the mountains, where the creature came from—and from where Ren herself fled ten years ago. Her path sets her on a collision course with Sunho, but he doesn’t realize she’s the girl that he—and a hundred other swords-for-hire—is looking for. As the two grow closer through their travels, they come to realize that their pasts—and destinies—are far more entwined than either of them could have imagined…
At first, I struggled to put together the worldbuilding and how the Underworld, the Floating World, and the world beyond the wall related to each other. The mentions of technology in Sunho’s first chapter didn’t fit with my expectations of the world from Ren’s first chapter, but the more I read, the more everything made sense and fit together.
Ren and Sunho were fine main characters. I actually would have liked a few more chapters from Jaeil’s POV. It seemed like there were a lot of layers and inner conflict to his character. I liked the themes of found family and friendship that Oh wove into her characters.
The climax with the general felt a touch anti-climactic since the entire book was building to that moment. I did appreciate how Oh did the ending so that it didn’t feel solely like set-up for book 2, but definitely left questions for the next book.
Overall, The Floating World was a fine read, but it was missing some sort of “spark” to make it stand out for me.
Cautions: around ten instances of swearing; light/moderate romance; brief kissing; moderate violence; brief mention of a gay couple
I received an eARC through NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Hailey Huntington 
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