[In Spring Moon Lord uses] an introductory section at the beginning of each chapter. This section may relate a bit of history, folklore, a family story, or a few lines of poetry, but each selection helps the reader to understand what follows without having to call a halt to the story while one of the characters or the intrusive author himself delivers a pompous lecture…. [The selections] clarify and enrich the novel without seeming to interrupt it.

The problem of language is not quite so gracefully solved. First of all, there is the matter of names…. In this book, except in the cases of actual historical persons, surnames, which tend to be simple, are in Chinese, and given names, which are more complicated, are in translation. Thus instead of calling the characters Chang Chun Yue or Chang K'ang Neng, they are called Chang Spring Moon or Chang Noble...