Today I have a well regarded, award winning, fantasy novel from 2018 to review. I had put this ebook on reserve four or five months ago and it only recently became available. That says something about how popular this five year old book is. Let's get into it.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Jade City by Fonda Lee DNF 52%
Quitting it at the 52% mark should tell you that I enjoyed the story, for a while. At first I was thinking that it would be a B grade read. But as the story went on, and on, I found that I had to force myself to pick the book up to read it. And finally, when I found myself skim reading long exposition pages and even action sequences, I decided that I had enough. It simply wasn't working for me.
Why? I've got the time, so if you do as well, let's go a little deeper into why this didn't work for me.
The story is set in Kekon, a fictional fantasy version of a Japan or Korea-like country. It is an island nation that had recently throw off fairly modern colonial rulers during some sort of world war. The setting is a late 20th century time period like era, with cars and expressways, airplanes, land phones, TVs, etc, all, I gather, relatively recently introduced. The world building is okay, Japanese-y, but with nothing particularly unique about it. The jade in the title comes from the fact that for a certain race of people, wearing jade gives them magical/super powers, but if they wear too much, it can make them go crazy and kill them.
The story concerns ex-freedom fighters who expelled the occupying colonial power, but are now criminal gangs, each of which control sections of the city of Janloon. We have the No Peak Clan, and their major rivals the Mountain Clan, as the main factions with a clan war brewing between them. In this respect it is a gangster story. We see the story from the No Peak Clan perspective, mostly. They are the "good guys" (sic) in the story.
My personal issues with this story include...
I'm not a crime story reader and I can't say that I would naturally root for a crime family. While the No Peak Clan seemed nice enough for a criminal enterprise, well, as you sow, so shall you reap. Que sera sera was pretty much my attitude.
The story is told from point of view of multiple characters, which is not my cup of tea. I found that there were too many for me to care about any one of them. Some of the point of view characters were not members of the No Peak Clan, and there was, I believe, some clumsy foreshadowing about one such character. The thing about stories of this type, beyond not spending enough time with any one character to develop an emotional tie to, is that they seem artificial to me. A constructed story, rather than an organic narration. I can sense the author building the story just behind the scenery as they assemble their mosaic of subplots.
Next, I don't like stories where the plot depends on people doing dumb things. I realize that a lot of stories require people to make mistakes, or do foolish things, but I don't like it when it seems that the story hangs on it. I also don't like choices that seem designed to create conflict/tension that don't make a lot of sense when examined from outside the plot. Let me explain.
Some mild spoilers ahead.
For an example in this book of people doing dumb things for the convenience of the plot, we have a sister of the No Peak Clan's leader. She has given up wearing jade, wishes to stay clear of the clan, and wants to live her own life. This includes having her own apartment outside of the guarded clan compound. However, without wearing jade, she does not have the magical/super powers that go with them. So with the first skirmishes of the clan war already underway, you would think that she would realize that she was a soft target to either be killed or kidnapped and use against her clan while living alone or traveling around a contested city. Despite her reluctance to don the jade again, you would think the danger would be obvious enough to her to don her jade in self defense, or at least live within the compound. But no, she hadn't at the 52% mark, and I have to believe that fact will come into play sooner or later, especially since she sent a secret bodyguard packing. Dumb. To me that doesn't make sense. She's not that naïve, so I have to believe that's for the convenience of the plot.
More central to the story is the fact that the more jade one wears the greater ones powers - as long as the person can control the power. Wear too much jade and it destroys the person. Jade does not appear to be any more rare than jade in this world. While the amount of jade produced is controlled, it is the criminal gangs who controlled the supply, so that you would think that each of these criminal organizations would be able to supply their thugs with all the jade they could handle. That being the case, I don't see why there would be any reason to wear the jade from a dead enemy thug in addition to their own, and thus, risking jade overload. This, however, is a major plot point, as the leader of the No Peak Clan kills an opponent in a duel and adds his jade ornaments to his own. However, he is not able to handle all that jade, causing all sorts of physical and mental issues. The in-story explanation amounts to saving face, showing how strong in handling jade he is, but you could just as easily argued that by showing distain for the defeated thug's jade, as something he doesn't need, would enhance his standing. Knowing the fate of those who overload themselves, there is no reason why this character should poison himself, still he does. It seems to be pure stupidity on his part, and to me, the reader, it seems something done only in the service of drama and plot, as it will no doubt play a large part in the last half of the story.
In addition, I found that the pacing rather slow, due, I think, to all the chapters devoted to subplots. There were at least six sub-plots that we were following, each featuring the various point of view characters. Some readers like these complex stories where all the sub-plots come together at the end, I don't. As I said at the beginning, I find this type of story too deliberately scripted to suspend my disbelief. In this story all those sub-plots just made for a fragmentary read that broke the narrative flow, for me.
Last word; all of my complaints arise out of my personal biases. If you don't share them, you may well like this book.
Coming next week; another fantasy novel and a detective novel reread.
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