Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao
Introduction In a not so ordinary pawnshop in Tokyo, you can pawn your choices and regrets and leave never knowing what you gave up. Water Moon follows the pawnshop owner's daughter, Hana, who wakes up to the shop ransacked and her father missing - but Hana has lived her entire life surrounded by puzzles and being trained in who to read (and to a certain extend manipulate) people. She embarks on her hunt for her father along with Keishin, a physicist from the "normal" world who cannot resist the idea of exploring a world that defies all the logic he breathes every day. The premise is simple, and the story is clear from the very beginning. But as Hana herself states several times, nothing is ever as it seems, and this book pulled the carpet away from under my feet several times at the end. It is a journey that never really slows down with each place being more magical and intriguing than the last. It was easy to tell from the very start that this book deserv...