Review of The Floating World by Axie Oh

*The Floating World* by Axie Oh (2025). Published by Feiwel & Friends.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

During this period I spent a lot of time at my local library, which has been an incredible place to get new movies, books, and even CDs as needed. I’m always a massive advocate for libraries, which is something we don’t often see from book influencers. Book social media tends to show a lot of buying, rather than lending, which is something I’m not entirely keen on myself.

Anyways, I loved Axie Oh’s novel The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea. It helped I was already very familiar with the myth that book was based on and consumed other forms of media based on it, so when I approached that book, I was already very much game for what I was reading. So when The Floating World came out, I already had my library request in and was ready to read it.

And once it arrived at the library and was in my hands, I ended up reading the entire book in one sitting. It wasn’t at 2 AM like when I read her other novel, but this was just pretty easy to read, which made sense to me because it’s for younger readers. I’m used to dense literary fiction, so this felt like an easy breeze through.

Let’s get into the review before I start rambling too much in the introduction!

Two individuals, brought by extraordinary circumstances, are chased down by a government looking to stop them.

We begin this novel with the main female character: Ren. She lives and works within a traveling troupe in the eastern part of this world, having been saved by Auntie, Little Uncle, and Big Uncle when she was a child. They go from village to village performing for the people living there, but everything is about to change.

When they go to a village to perform at a festival, a scream breaks out. A demon emerges from the woods, looking humanlike, and goes for people’s arteries, brutally killing anyone in its path. Big Uncle goes off to try and stop the demon, sacrificing himself for everyone, but it isn’t enough.

Little Uncle is scratched saving Ren from the demon, which has devastating consequences, and Ren, using the power of light trapped within her, kills the demon. Little Uncle then goes into a coma-like fever after being scratched by the demon, and the General, who runs this land after the disappearance of the descendants of the Celestial Maiden, hears world of a strange silver light coming from the East.

He sends his men to capture the girl who’s the source of the light, including his son Jaeil, who we see has ulterior motives throughout the course of the book. Ren leaves behind her family to find a cure for her uncle, and we pivot to the main male character: Sunho.

He’s a mercenary for hire in the Under World, having formerly worked as a soldier in the past. Two years prior, he woke up with only the memory of his name, and his sword. His memories slowly trickle back to him throughout the course of the book, especially the ones of his brother Junho, who he is looking for, and he decides to take on a job to find the girl whose light was seen throughout the east.

This puts the two of them on a crash collision course. When Ren finds Sunho injured in the woods, she saves him, and the two are stuck together ever since. We learn the source of Ren’s light and why exactly the General wants her, adding some new characters along the way, and the duo journey to achieve their goals of saving Little Uncle and finding wherever Junho is in the world.

This is the main focus of the book, which I assume is a part of a series because of how abruptly it ended. Everything in this book moves quickly, which makes sense considering Ren has to find a cure before it’s too late, but at the same time I thought it felt incredibly rushed as a reader as well. It very clearly was set up to be more than one book because of that, as there are so many gaps and questions about what exactly I just read.

Overall Thoughts

I’ll have to admit upfront: I wasn’t the biggest fan of the book. Yes, I flew through it, but I also think that’s because the plot was pretty simple and straightforward, and the writing itself is geared towards younger readers. It’s very plain language and there aren’t many flowery, descriptive sentences about the world and its people.

Like we get the gist of what’s going on here, but I hope in future books they expand upon the world and really build on it more. They discuss how it’s built on mythology and there seem to be levels (Floating World, Under World, wherever Ren is living), but besides the political and class themes being gently touched upon we don’t really go beyond that.

Maybe I’m not the right demographic for this book in the end, and that’s okay. There are definite strengths to this book, even though this review might come across a little more as critical. Taste is incredibly subjective, and I’m just not the right reader for this book specifically. Someone else might love it a lot more than I did, and neither of us are wrong.

So go pick it up if you’re interested from your local indie bookstore or library. You might love this book in the end!

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