12/02/2020
3 ⭐
If I'm honest, I don't really know where to start. But, I guess I should always start with the positives so here they are:
- this would be a good (and quick) Halloween read
- There's not much dialogue so this is a fast read
- Very diverse (Chinese-American main characters, both queer, Nova is HoH, Tam is Non-binary, Nova has two grandmas)
- An interesting take on werewolves in connection to magic.

The negatives:
- I wasn't a fan of the HoH rep, which I feel bad about but, that's the truth. I generally steer away from deaf/hoh rep because it's hardly ever ownvoices which means it's usually not very good, and in this case, I just wasn't a fan.
I appreciated Nova having hearing aids and complaining about having to take them off to answer the phone, but that's about it. There was no signing (in any capacity), there were no hand gestures or lip-reading and that felt really really weird to me. Basically, my point is this, if you want to have a deaf character they need to actually be deaf THE WHOLE TIME. You can't just slap some hearing aids on them and problem fixed! Hearing aids do not equal being able to hear everything.

Other than this reading really false for me, Mooncakes came across as really underdeveloped to me (no context for relationships, characters, world-building etc.) and seemed to just rely on rep and witchcraft to pull in readers. That being said, I've found that's often the way with first volumes of non-hero comics. But, if this is a standalone then my point still stands and it needed to be better developed in terms of pretty much everything, it just felt very half-baked to me.