I had two clear thoughts in my mind, early on in this book: first, that for the setting, I was picturing Republic City from The Legend of Korra; and second, that the main character’s approach to life reminds me of Sokka from The Last Airbender. While the latter could, conceivably, have been an actual influence, the more I read, the more that I thought the former was just that both were based on the same sort of “1920s New York aesthetic in a heavily Chinese-inspired locale.”
The whole book, really, leans heavily into that Chinese folklore feeling, and it’s absolutely delightful. There’s a strong sense of a weighty, and long, past behind everything. This is a world that has a rich history. It’s also a world that had a People’s Revolution and is now in a very modern-feeling “we’re the People’s Secret Police” sort of place. A different kind of weighty, that.
The protagonist works well, here; he was raised in a temple as a sort of indentured servant of the state, and sets him up for a sort of simultaneous cynicism and naïveté; he’s cynical about his place in the world, about the role of class in his life, but also utterly naïve about the inherent corruption of a secret police. To spoil something from very early on, he saves the day from a bombing, and not once does he come to the (to me) obvious conclusion that it was a plot by the secret police.
The setting also has some interesting mechanics going on: a magic system that works well for big cinematic setpieces, and Avatar-style Doing Magic With Martial Arts, but also feels thoroughly influenced by electromagnetic physics. A delightfully chaotic reincarnation-ish system, which creates some hilarious interactions between characters who either have or haven’t yet figured out that’s what’s going on.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It ends on a vicious cliffhanger, but I at least managed to wait long enough to read this one that the sequel is now out, so hopefully I’ll be reading it soon. Check it out.1
- This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩