Friday, December 4, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Jade War by Fonda Lee

 





Jade War is the second book in Fonda Lee's "The Green Bone Saga", after 2018's "Jade City".  These books are part of a trilogy with an easy and very appealing hook: it's The Godfather meets Wuxia/Kung Fu/Magical Ninjas/whatever you want to call it, and the first book in the trilogy really lived up to that marketing hook.  And yet for some reason, while the book's craft was undeniable, and the plot was never boring, I just never felt the drive to continue with the book's sequel, even taking out the book once from the library for a period of a month and a half before putting it back unread, because I never had time to reread Jade City.  But Jade War was nominated for the Ignyte Award for Best Novel, so I found time to give it one more shot.  

And well Jade War is more of the same.  If you wanted an Asian or Hong Kong inspired fantasy take on the Godfather and liked how that played out in Jade City?  You'll like that here, especially as it moves to a larger scale (ala Godfather 2), expanding its plot beyond its central Island of Kekon into neighboring nations, with major impacts.  On the other hand, for me, I just came away from it all a little cold, never bored exactly, but never really inspired to keep reading - and one of the protagonist's actions left me with a serious bad taste.  I may or may not be continuing into book 3 when it comes out next year, but if I do, I won't be bothering with a reread of this one first, it hasn't quite earned the time.

Note: Spoilers for Jade City are inevitable below.  You are forewarned.

----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
The Kaul family, leaders of the No Peak clan on the island of Kekon, have reached an uneasy détente with their rivals on the island, the Mountain clan.  Hilo has settled in to his role as the clan's Pillar, its ultimate leader, and Shae into her role as the clan's Weather Man (chief spy/advisor).  Both clans are clearly biding their time for their next move in their war for control over the island and the island's most valuable resource: Jade, the substance which grants them their tremendous strength and power, which makes them the envy of foreign nations from around the world. 

And to strengthen their positions, No Peak will need to forge alliances with those foreigners and to risk getting involved in foreign wars off the island.  To that end, the Kauls turn to their adopted brother Emery Anden, the youngster who refused the position of Green Bone and the power of Jade after his first taste of it resulted in a gleeful killing of enemy fighters, a glee that scares him.  But when Anden is sent to the country of Espenia to learn its language and culture, he finds an expatriate society that is nothing like he's ever seen before, but contains as many threats for a boy of his age as any he might've found in the gang wars on Kekon. 

But the Mountain will not sit still and simply wait while No Peak and the Kauls establish new alliances for the fight, and they will fight dirty in their quest to destroy everything the Kauls hold dear.  And that is to say nothing of others who would take advantage of the clan war to bring harm to the island for their very own purposes.....  
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Jade War continues the format of the prior novel, jumping back and forth between a few point of view characters, mainly Hilo, Shae, Anden and rarely the idiotic criminal Bero, who continues to be involved with things at a rate that almost strains credulity.  But as you can tell from the plot summary, the story moves on from street conflict on the island to a conflict that is international in nature, for the power of Jade is one that warring foreign nations will obviously not leave alone.  Anden and others as a result wind up in the foreign country of Espenia (which very much feels like America), where a Kekonese diaspora has to deal with discrimination and a country whose culture and laws don't quite gel with Kekonese culture.  Hilo and Shae wind up dealing in large part with not just the Espenians, but a foreign smuggler of Jade who causes problems on the island, and the other foreign powers - through their dealings with the Mountain and each other - pose their own individual threat.  

Lee does a typically (for her works, since I've now read 5 of them) excellent job at juggling all these different plotlines and character moments, such that the reader never feels overwhelmed and usually feels pretty damn invested in all of them (with an exception of Bero's storyline, which isn't really meant to stand on its own anyhow).  Each of the characters grows in what are usually interesting ways, particularly Shae, Anden and Wen, all of whom have really tremendous arcs here: Shae having to deal with being the Weather Man while still wanting to have some life outside of it, leading her to take desperate actions to assert herself she never could have imagined for herself previously; Anden learning how his culture has adapted to life in a diaspora and finding love for the first time in a local boy; Wen desperate to be not just a hindrance to Hilo and the others and to prove her use as more than just a mother...these are all done tremendously well and had me invested in turning just one more page whenever I thought about putting this down to see where it would take them all.  

Unfortunately, there's one major character I didn't mention above, and that's Hilo, who was already my least favorite character going in - the good brawler forced into a leadership role he isn't really meant for despite his brilliant personal skills (he has no patience or sense of long term tactics/strategy in a gang war/political conflict).  But in this book, Hilo's brash impatience leads to him committing an offense so absolutely heinous, which no one calls him into account for here (I suspect that'll come next book).  And this is one of our serious protagonists, who we're arguably supposed to root for...but he just made me want instead to root for The Mountain, who never seems to act in the same way, and while ruthless always seems ruthless to a legitimate end (for them) and is led by a woman, Ayt, who has destroyed everyone in her way who could stop her.  The book tries to draw parallels between Ayt and Shae, contrasting them as ambitious smart women who can see the long game, but with Shae's sense of honor and family making her seemingly the one we're supposed to root for....except Hilo's actions essentially make that contrast meaningless since he's honestly worse than Ayt in these regards, so Shae's support of him isn't really a mark in her credit. 

The book ends on a note that promises an interesting turn of events, and I imagine things are going to change significantly in the final volume.  But my dislike of the protagonist's side, even as I do still like Shae and Anden, makes me just struggle to really want to dive into it, since I have a damn good feeling the protagonists will triumph in the end (although Hilo may not survive I guess).  Others who don't have as much of an issue with how things play out may enjoy this more, and again even before Hilo's action the overall plot was more absorbing as I read it than when I took my head out of its pages, so it never really hit fully home for me.  But the craft here is still excellent and I can see why others might like it more.  

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