Monday, May 13, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Girl King by Mimi Yu



The Girl King is the Young Adult Fantasy debut of author Mimi Yu, beginning an epic fantasy series with an East Asian inspired world.  Though it's not labeled anywhere I can find as part of a series, it's not a stand-alone novel, with a sequel apparently coming in 2020, and a cliffhanger ending.  So if you're looking for a stand-alone fantasy novel, this isn't it.  But if you're looking for the start of a series, The Girl King might interest you.

For The Girl King is honestly one of the more interesting fantasy books I've read in a while.  The keynote though is "interesting," which is not "necessarily" the same thing as "good."  The book has a number of flaws - it has a really slow start for one - but has a lot of ideas that are executed in particularly different ways than I'm used to.  So in addition to dealing with ideas about power and privilege, oppression and colonization in ways that I've definitely seen before, the book's third protagonist is one of the more interestingly done characters in ways I have a hard time describing.

Let's see if I can do better more specifics after the jump:


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
Emperor Daagmun of the Empire of the First Flame is sick and it is clear he does not have long for this world, and that he must name an heir.   His eldest, his daughter Lu, has always believed it would be her, and the commoners have nicknamed her "The Girl King" as a result, but Lu has paid it little mind, preferring instead to dream about the directions she would take the Empire under her rule.  But when her father instead names her cousin Set as heir and decrees that Lu is to marry him, Lu instead challenges Set to a contest to determine who shall really rule.  But Set has no intention of playing fair, and Lu finds herself on the run.

To survive on the run, Lu will ally herself with a young teenage boy named Nokhai, the last survivor of the Slipskins - shapeshifters who the Empire wiped out through murders and labor camps.  Nokhai escaped the labor camps that wiped out his family but has lived the last few years in anonymity as an apprentice to an apothecary in the country. But when Lu comes into his life, Nokhai finds himself able to shift into wolf form for the first time in his life...and forced to help her run to the edge of the country, where Lu intends to ally with the remains of a magical people the Empire once tried to eliminate in order to get back Lu's kingdom.  Yet Lu's privileged upbringing, and status as the potential heir to the kingdom that inflicted such horrors upon Nokhai and his family, make it hard for Nokhai to truly trust her.....and without that trust, the two of them may simply be making their way to a fatal end.

Meanwhile, Lu's sibling Min has always been seemingly the opposite of her sister, shy where Lu is brash, demure to her social betters where Lu is challenging, and to some extent, Min has always felt like the second best as a result, talked down to by everyone.  But when she discovers a presence within her, and the capability for magic, Min finds herself unexpectedly wanted.....by Set, who believes he can use her power.  But what does Min herself truly want?

In the end, Lu, Min & Nokhai will have to find their own destinies, and they may not be what any of them ever expected.  And those destinies will change the Empire....forever.
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I'm going to reverse my usual order of talking about books in this review, where I normally talk about the positives of a book first before getting into the negatives, because I want to get the main complaints I have about this book out of the way first.  The main thing is really that the book takes an awfully long time to get going, with it taking around 40% of the way through the book before we get into the inevitable plot conflicts that the reader will have been expecting from the beginning (whether or not they read the blurb at the back of this book or not).  And while some books use that slow beginning to develop interesting characters or flesh-out the setting, The Girl King generally gets only to the interesting aspects of its characters after it gets past that 40%, and its setting isn't quite that interesting.

Still, after that slow beginning, The Girl King does get to a point where its two main leads, Lu and Nokhai, are particularly interesting.  As I mentioned above the jump, this book deals heavily in themes of power and privilege and the evils of oppression and colonization, and it's with these two that we really get to see that.  Lu is a pretty spoiled rotten girl at the start of this book - while her heart is somewhat in the right place in terms of what she'd try to do if she did become the next Emperor, and she's always felt hated by her mother, she's always felt that she deserves to be the next King and that it will obviously happen.  In a weaker book, Lu would realize her entitlement and change her ways, but this book doesn't take that easy way out.  Lu is confronted by the realities of what her people have done through conquest and colonization as the book goes on and is questioned for her entitlement, but her change of heart, is slow and far from complete, as her understanding isn't fully there yet even by the book's end.  A lifetime of ignorant entitlement is not so easily forgotten, and The Girl King knows that, with Lu's development throughout being fascinating from beginning to end.

Nokhai is the opposite of Lu - the last survivor of a clan destroyed by Lu's people, and obviously distrusts her quite a bit as a result.  He's probably the most generic of the main cast - a chosen one of magical power, and the romance between him and Lu (which you'll see coming a mile away) is rather predictable.  But while Nokhai is the most tropey of the major characters, he's executed rather well, so you can easily understand why he doesn't want or feel he deserves any special destiny, why he doesn't trust himself over Lu, and you can easily get to caring about him...once you get past that slow beginning.

And then there's our tertiary protagonist, Min, who is the most interesting thing about this novel, if one of the hardest to read.  The book blurb for this book doesn't do justice to what it does with Min, who really goes the most against the typical tropes of any character in this book.  Describing how is hard, I have trouble finding the right words for it.  To some extent, Min is is emotionally damaged by the circumstances of her growing up, with an overbearing mother who loves her but doesn't trust Min with Min's own protection on one hand and a sister with utmost pride and arrogance in her own righteousness on the other, one who has never really tried to be close to Min.  No one has ever directly abused Min physically or emotionally, but the shy reserved girl she is has always felt unwanted and to some extent longed to be the one on center stage, to be the one wanted instead of the rest of her family.  When Min discovers magical power within her, stemming from a partial possession by a possibly malevolent spirit, one would think the book would go in a direction where she learns about her own power and tries to take center stage herself, as a heroine of her own story.

Yet Min's story does not go in that direction, even as I kept waiting for Min to reject the antagonists - her and Lu's cousin Set and his dangerous magic-wielding monk named "Brother" - for manipulating her for their own ends.  I don't want to spoil here (see below for some spoilers in ROT13), but in essence, whereas Nokhai and Lu form types of heroes you might find in a cynical fantasy world torn apart by the forces of xenophobia, colonization and privilege, Min forms an absolute tragic figure.  It makes her chapters, where the story is told from her own point of view, often hard to read, but the result is really powerful.

Spoiler in ROT13: Rffragvnyyl, Zva'f fgbel freirf nf xvaq bs n Fgneg bs Qnexarff bs n irel qvssrerag xvaq.  Zva pbaivaprf urefrys gung ure zntvp vf hfrshy bayl nf n jnl bs trggvat Frg gb ybir ure, gb jnag ure, naq gung ol sbyybjvat uvf tbnyf fur'yy or noyr gb orne uvf puvyqera naq znxr uvz unccl - naq gung nf uvf rzcerff fur'yy gura or noyr gb cneqba ure fvfgre va gur raq.  Fur gvrf ure bja unccvarff gb bguref, bguref jvgu frysvfu zbgvirf gung qba'g pner nobhg ure, naq gurfr bguref qba'g fheivir gur fgbel va gur raq....yrnqvat gb Zva qrpvqvat gb rzoenpr ure cbjref nf Rzcerff, nsgre univat qrfgeblrq gur uvqvat cynpr bs gur sbervta crbcyr gung fgbbq va ure rivy uhfonaq'f jnl va n qrzbafgengvba bs ure cbjref.  Gur frdhry jvyy anghenyyl oevat ure va pbasyvpg nf gur znva nagntbavfg bs gur fgbel, naq V'z fpnerq lrg rntre gb frr ubj guvatf jvyy npghnyyl cynl bhg.

I suppose I should talk more generally about the plot in general rather than continuing to gush about the characters.  Again, after that slow 40%, the book picks up pace, with the action moving rather briskly now that the setup has been done and before you know it the book picks up threads from the prologue.*  As I mentioned above the jump, this is not a stand-alone novel and the book ends on a tremendous cliffhanger - still it is a satisfying resolution of the arcs for each character begun in this book, so the cliffhanger doesn't bother me too much.  If this book had a better and quicker beginning, I'd be in absolute love with it, but it took me so long to get through the start just because of that slow pacing.

*Minor quibble I can't help but add here: the prologue makes a deal out of the mystery soldier antagonists wielding guns, and then guns never come up again, with all sides relying on swords and bows for the entire plot, including the antagonists in question.  It's weird.

In short, I definitely recommend giving The Girl King a try, with some interesting themes and a really interesting third lead character which makes this book very different.  I'm eager to see, now that the setup is out of the way, where the book is going to go from here, as I have no clue really the direction we're going, which is kind of exciting.
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