Thursday, December 23, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Dragons of Heaven by Alyc Helms

 




The Dragons of Heaven is the start of Alyc Helms' Missy Masters series* of pulp-ish superheroine novels.  I hadn't heard of Helms until they joined together with author Marie Brennan (The Memoirs of Lady Trent) to co-write the Rook and Rose trilogy (under the pen name M.A. Carrick), which I've grown to really really love two books in.  So I decided to go back and check out Helms' solo work, since I'd already greatly enjoyed Brennan's, and fortunately the New York Public Library had both books in stock.  

*I say "series", but it looks like the series has stalled at two novels since this book and its sequel came out in 2016, and I do not know Helms is planning on writing any more.*  

And well, The Dragons of Heaven could easily have gone horribly wrong - it features a white heroine in a story set largely in China, based upon Chinese myths/religion/culture, with Helms themselves being a white author.  But Helms seems to toe that line very well, never verging into White Savior territory with her protagonist, and handling the parts of Chinese culture included in ways that never seem exploitative or inappropriate - although I'm a White Jewish guy, so it's possible others might disagree with my assessment.  

Most importantly, The Dragons of Heaven is very fun with a really witty genre savvy protagonist, a pulp setting filled with superheroes, villains, and mythological beings in an alternate modern world.  The plot also subverts expectations quite frequently with the story moving in directions I certainly didn't expect all the way from beginning to end.  There's some pretty good stuff here, and I'll be trying the sequel probably sooner rather than later.  

NOTE: The Amazon Plot Summary for this book is SUPER spoilery.  Would recommend you skip it, even if it won't ruin your enjoyment of the book.  
--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Missy Masters' grandfather was the shadow-wielding superhero known to the world as Mr. Mystic, a hero with a good reputation until he disappeared.  So when Missy inherits his ability to wield shadows and interact with the so-called Shadow Realm, she's determined to use those powers for good.  Unfortunately, without the training her grandfather had, her first adventure ends in embarrassment.  

So Missy decides the only thing to do is to follow her grandfather's path and search out his old master in China, the dragon Lung Huang.  But what Missy finds there in China is not what she expected, and it changes her life forever, for good and bad.  

Years later, Missy is back in San Francisco, now performing superheroics in disguise as her grandfather Mr. Mystic, facing off against villains, mob bosses, and dangerous triads.  But when a magical barrier is raised cutting off China and seemingly every Chinatown in the world from the rest of society, it soon becomes clear that the only one who can cut off the barrier is someone with the powers of Shadow.  

And so Missy will have to return to China, and face what she left behind - and this time, what she faces may be too much for one heroine to handle on her own.....
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The Dragons of Heaven is told from Missy's first person perspective in chapters that alternate between a past timeline (prefaced with "Then") telling the story of Missy's first experience in China and a present timeline (prefaced with "Now") featuring Missy dealing with crime on the streets of San Francisco and then a world-level threat that forces her to return to China.  The story makes this work very well, as the past timeline is unveiled in such a way to keep the reader intrigued as to what happened to Missy while at the same time revealing characters who will become relevant to the present timeline in such a way that it feels natural for the reader to understand who they are when they encounter them again.  

And both storylines are held together by Missy, a first person heroine who is incredibly entertaining and interesting.  Yes Missy wants to do good with her powers, but that's less from a craving for attention (although some of that is there) and more for a caring for people, which results in her changing quite a bit during the past storyline in ways you wouldn't expect.  The general storyline you see when a kung fu student hero falls in love with their master (as becomes the case here) is it going poorly quickly, and the student hero leaving to pursue their fighting career - but that's not the case here, where Missy instead goes in another direction because well, she care enough about people to care about her dragon master/lover's honor and family, no matter how ridiculous it is.  She's, as someone puts it, a bit of an idealist in trying to win all these battles of honor on her own even for people's sakes who really a rational person wouldn't care about.  And well, she's both genre savvy and snarky about the whole thing, which makes her incredibly entertaining with her own thoughts and dialogue, so it's easy to love her in both storylines as things go south.  

Aiding Missy as a character is a story that starts with setups you may have seen before but then moves in very different directions.  Oh there's a corporate league of superheroes that's sketchy that Missy doesn't want to be part of, there's the usual US-China conflict that Missy has to be careful of, with Missy's genre-savvyness making her understand that she'd be foolish, naive, and offensive to think that China needs a white woman like her to be the savior of the day (this book very much avoids the white savior trope in a careful dodge, in ways that would be spoilers to explain).  But the book takes things from that setup in ways I didn't expect, like the aforementioned romantic relationship with her dragon master which moves forward in ways that well I don't remember seeing before in a modern book that isn't sexist bullshit.  The motivations of the antagonist are surprising but very well done, especially in the present day storyline, and the way the various characters combine to fill various roles and powers is always really interesting and different.  And the book's exploration of Chinese myths and cultures, with different creatures and beings being in place in places that Missy will encounter them and sometimes come into conflict with, works rather well.  

The result is a pulp superheroine type novel that is fun, entertaining, and very different than what I expected, which made me want to keep reading to see how things would go.  It ends on a satisfying note that also serves as a potential major cliffhanger, with Missy in a very different place at the end than the beginning, and I'm curious how Helms will take her from here - assuming the series lasted long enough to actually explore it.  

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