Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

Author: Grace Lin
Lexile measure: 810
Language:  No swear words, no potty language.
Violence: one character threatens to destroy a village but it gets saved before anything happens, a girl talks about how she has a scar because she was stabbed as a child (no gory description).
Big Kid Mature Topics:  poverty, "fortune", running away from home, takes place in China so there is some cross cultural stuff, but nothing scary, gods/goddesses.
Illustrations: monocolor  papercut like drawings at the beginning of each chapter and sparse full color illustrations
Plot: very complex, kind of like Chronicles of Narnia, not like War and Peace, with interweaving plots.

There is a good reason this book got the Newberry Honor.  Wow.  Like eating dim sum in Chinatown (if you are a foodie), it was so yummy!  Neither my daughter, nor I could put this down. Amazingly, its an adventure without being very scary or at all violent.  The theme is thankfulness.  We're so psyched that there is another companion novel available at our library!  Grace Lin has also written the "Year of the ..." series, which I thought was equally well done, but has some stuff about crushes and school that I thought would be better for older kids.  This one would be fine for a 4 year old and up, maybe sooner, because its more of a fantasy.