This review was made possible via an ARC through NetGalley.

Pangu’s Shadow by Karen Bao is a Sapphic science fiction mystery YA featuring chronic illness, Asian, and immigrant representation. Ver has a degenerative illness that leaves her needing a cane and aware that she could die before the age of thirty. She and Aryl are both students working in a medical research lab and both are immigrants from Moon Three and Moon Two, respectively. The pair do not get along but are brought together when Cal, their mentor, dies in the lab in front of them.

The novel explores the intersections of classism, immigration, and illness against this backdrop of a murder mystery. The mystery elements themselves did not personally work for me, but the social critique did as did the use of scientific terms and explanations. It’s very easy to veer into sounding condescending or to use terminology that is hard to parse when discussing concepts that are often learned in the science classroom, but Bao made these explanations feel more like a reinforcement than a lesson. It felt organic and true to the characters.

Ver and Aryl’s character arcs are linked to their identities as immigrants and to each other. Aryl is a dancer who is attracted to her teammate, Rhea, and frustrated by the way her family is treated on Moon One. Aryl herself is often treated as less than and an outsider despite being born on Moon One; what matters is where her parents came from, even if they are intelligent and hardworking. Ver’s mother suffers from addiction while Ver’s main goal is to find a way to slow down her illness.

I recommend this to fans of YA sci-fi, shorter chapters, and those looking for stories about immigrants with a bit of an SFF twist. I do not recommend this to readers looking for more mystery or thriller elements in their books.

I wasn't actually looking to start a new book when I requested this one, but the name and description hooked me, and so did the story itself. I read this over the course of about two sittings; it's always fun to have that "can't put it down" feeling line up with a night when you have hours to actually not put it down, and that's the experience I got with Pangu's Shadow. The part that appealed to me - a sci-fi mystery - delivered, keeping me engaged the whole time. Throughout, Bao layered in nuanced world building, slow burn relationship development, and a thoughtful exploration of the characters and their experiences. As she writes in the author's note (I'm paraphrasing), it's a mystery, but it's also a book about science, about racism and xenophobia, about queerness, about disability, about the experience of being an immigrant. It really delivered on all fronts - engaging and thoughtful but still accessible. Bao really did a masterful job of utilizing a sci-fi setting to explore relatable experiences, especially regarding disability, queerness, and xenophobia in academia, without the whole thing feeling like a story that exists solely to comment on the real world. I'd thoroughly recommend this book to anyone, but fans of thoughtful space mysteries in particular!

The different worlds are fascinating, and I enjoyed the race to find evidence of innocence. The main characters go from hate to love a little quickly to be believable, in my opinion. The science explanations were informative without being overly complicated.

The murder of a famous scientist within a laboratory at the most prestigious institute in the universe forces Aryl and Ver, scientific apprentices, and Jaha, the lab manager, to either team up or rat each other out to save their own skin. This murder mystery marries science, friendship, queerness, classism and racism in an epic story that crosses many moons as Aryl and Ver discover secrets they were never meant to learn.

I found the only drawback to be the middle lagged for me. I would have liked to pace from the beginning and end to match the middle section better! Once I got to the last quarter of the book, I was dialed in. I really enjoyed the theme of people from different backgrounds trying to find a place in a world that wouldn’t support them. I think it was a really well written story with a very intricate world built into it.

I honestly tried getting into this book but it really wasn’t for me. I thought based on the description that I would really like this book but I struggled connecting to the characters. I think there is a good story here and that a lot of people will enjoy it and connect but unfortunately I am not one of them.