I read the sequel to this book (The Moon and the Face) in June - and wow, this book is just so much better. Even if I had read them in the proper order, I'm pretty sure my opinion would be the same.
'Moon-Flash' is a simple, short book, but carefully crafted, emotionally touching, and with subtle social commentary.
Kyreol is a young woman of a primitive society. Her people live along the banks of a river, their world circumscribed by a cliff face upstream and a waterfall downstream. No one has ever ventured beyond these limits. Time is measured by the Moon-Flash, an event given religious significance - a time for betrothals and ritual.
However, Kyreol has always been more curious than others of her tribe - and when she meets a strange Hunter in the woods, she sets out, with her childhood friend, Terje, leaving her betrothed behind, to see what might lie beyond the boundaries of her world... and to try to discover what might have happened to her mother, long-since-disappeared.

What Kyreol finds is that her people have been living 'protected' by a high-technology society - almost like an ethnological museum exhibit. Even the most sacred event of her people is simply a technological phenomenon of the wider world.

It's an interesting discussion - although McKillip doesn't romanticize the 'simple life' of the primitive people too much - and neither does she paint them as wide-eyed innocents (they are intelligent, resourceful, and quickly adaptable) - she does make the point that in a more sophisticated society, something may be lost. In this case, she hints, it may be the precognitive(?) dreams of the people of the Riverworld. But even so, does any society have the right to hide things from another, denying them knowledge, and therefore, choice?

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I have been a fan of Patricia McKillips' fantasy for some years now. It is always moving and lyrical, and she captures the feel of old fairy tales better than any other author I know of. I have slowly been acquiring all of her books, and so in the course of my collecting I happened upon Moon-Flash in an out-of-print mass market edition. I immediately liked the cover art, for the alien animals and because Kyreol was a woman of color -- something still FAR too rare on the SF and Fantasy shelves. Something about the cover, too, reminded me of Island of the Blue Dolphins, though I can not tell you what it was.

I finally got around to reading Moon-Flash because I was falling behind in my SF Challenge and it was very short. I read it in a morning's sitting, falling easily into McKillip's more toned-down style (at least, compared to her fantasy; there's still plenty of symbolism and metaphor compared to most SF out there) and into Kyreol's child-like perspective. This is definitely a book suitable for a fairly young audience -- I would say it's suitable for even precocious 9-year olds -- but it is one of those rare books that despite that still holds riches for mature audiences. Children will immediately be able to relate to Kyreol's vast curiosity and fear; adults will be able to understand better the parts of the world that Kyreol can not -- its simplicities and its strangenesses, its tragedies, its hard choices.

It is a coming-of-age tale, a romance, a meditation on the power of dreams. It is a traveler's tale, and a tale of first contact. It is also a delicately beautiful exploration of the ethics of Star Trek's Prime Directive: an exploration, I say, because McKillip gives us no easy answers. But ultimately, it is a moving book about love, in all its forms: romantic love, the love between parents and children, and the abstract love of entire peoples, which can build monuments and change worlds.

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