Wednesday, January 30, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean




Empress of All Seasons is a Young Adult/Middle-Grade Fantasy in a world inspired by Japanese mythology.  And the book features a pretty well done fantasy world, which includes magic, yokai, samurai, ninja, and stories of potentially still-present gods.  The book also features three lead characters who split the story's points of view, who are all rather interesting in their personalities, even if they're a little cliche in their backgrounds at first.

Unfortunately, Empress of All Seasons has a major pacing problems, with the book's third act featuring a predictable but weakly developed plot twist and a major 180 from one of the characters that feels straight out of a really bad movie.  For two/thirds of the book, the story moves its characters into interesting places, which makes the reader hungry to find out how their conflicting pathways will be resolved - and the book just didn't come close to meeting my expectations in how it tried to do so - and the rushed ending just didn't help matters.  In short, this was a book with a lot of potential, but in my opinion squandered pretty much all of it, and I can't recommend it that highly as a result.

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
In the land of Honoku, the god Sugita first created yokai, beings with supernatural-esque abilities and forms, before then creating humans in his own image.  But Sugita wished for humanity to rule over the Yokai, so he gave humanity a second language - curses that can cause them great harm.  And then he appointed a human emperor above all.

The current Emperor has a passionate hate for Yokai and has enslaved and sought to keep those he cannot enslave oppressed and in fear.  And so when Mari, a young Yokai woman - an animal girl who can transform into a bestial form - comes to the Imperial capital, she knows that a single misstep will cost her her life.  But Mari's path is dangerous for more reasons than that - for she seeks to enter the competition to find the next bride for the Prince - and hence the next Empress - by surviving the four magical seasonal rooms and fulfilling the required tasks....a competition that is forbidden to Yokai.  Mari isn't that interested in the prize - but her mother has asked her to do it so that she can steal the Emperor's treasure.

But what Mari doesn't know is that her feelings will be changed and altered by the actions of two others around her.  First there is her childhood friend, the half-yokai Akira - the so-called Son of Nightmares - who seeks to learn to fight in order to protect Mari and joins the Yokai resistance seeking to end their oppression.

And then there is Taro, the Imperial Prince she is competing to marry, a boy who wants nothing to do with power and just to be let alone to tinker and invent in his workshop.  As Mari and Taro interact more, the two begin falling in love, despite Mari's secret presenting the power to tear them apart...especially with forces outside their control marshaling to change the status quo by any means necessary.
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Empress of All Seasons succeeds in its worldbuilding and, for two/thirds of the book at least, in its character development.  The book alternates between the perspectives of Mari (our lead heroine), Taro, and Akira, with occasional chapters illustrating actions of the gods of this land and of prior historical events.  The result is to paint a vivid and imaginative world based upon Japanese mythology, while also showing the problems with this world that have led to the inevitable coming conflicts over the course of the plot.

The First Two Parts of the book deal with the competition to become Empress, while setting the stage for the greater conflict between the Resistance and the ruling Emperor, and these parts of the book are excellent.  Mari's struggles to win a competition she doesn't really care about, while trying not to harm anyone make her an easy character to root for.  Moreover, the book doesn't overdo her naivete about the horrors inflicted upon Yokai that she has been sheltered from, which is a nice touch to keep her feeling sympathetic and not annoying.  Akira's struggle to try and learn to fight so he can protect Mari is also well done, with a character who could've easily been seen as stalker-ish taking a totally different route and being all the better for it.  And then there's Taro, who is excellent for these two acts as the human prince who just wants freedom and feels ashamed of his inadvertent contributions to his father's campaign against Yokai.  Together, the plot and these characters work....for the first wo of three acts.

As I mentioned above the jump though, this book has a MAJOR pacing problem, good lord, with it reminding me in the worst ways of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith in the final act.   In this final third, book relies on a generic and lazy plot twist - featuring a character who screams "OBVIOUSLY EVIL" from his introduction and disappears for most of the plot until the twist occurs, and then follows that up with one character making a total 180 in his beliefs and personality that totally does not fit the character up to that point in any sense whatsoever.  So instead of having three interesting characters of different levels of privilege struggling to change things for the better, we wind up instead with a more straight forward conflict that is not only disappointing, but just feels unsupported by any of the work done before.*

*To Compare this to a book I read recently with a sort of similar-ish plot twist, A Spark of White Fire, this book's twist fails while that one succeeds because in that book, our perspective of the character who betrays the heroine is given by an unreliable outside narrator, whereas here, we get to see the perspective of the character doing the turn of face, and so it just really really doesn't work.

 And then there's the ending, which....woof - having resolved the conflict in the second to last chapter with a kind of unsatisfying resolution, the story seems to have set a cliffhanger for a sequel as dark times lie ahead.  Instead the book has a short few page long epilogue where it assures us that the remaining good characters have dealt with the surviving antagonist(s) and changed things for the better, with some difficulty, over the past few years.  It's as if the author found herself in a bit of a hole and just decided to hand-wave away the unsatisfying parts of her ending instead of try to write another book or act.  For once I'm complaining about the lack of a cliffhanger - because this ending isn't satisfying, it just makes me mad.

In short, I have to recommend a pass on this book - it doesn't just squander its potential in my opinion in favor of a lesser route, it takes a route that actively wastes every interesting thing setup and as such will likely in my opinion at least only annoy other readers if they share my way of looking at books.

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