Jade City

STATS

Title: Jade City

Series: The Green Bone Saga (Book 1)

Author(s): Fonda Lee

Genre: Fantasy (Epic)

First Printing: November 2017

Publisher: Orbit

SPOILER WARNING

Mild spoilers will be necessary to properly break down this story.  I will include “Heavy Spoilers” in the heading for any section where further detail is required.  I will keep the first paragraph of section as spoiler-free as possible in case you want to read the book for yourself before coming back for the full analysis.

PREMISE & PLOT

Since the revolution that freed the island of Kekon from foreign occupation, the capital city of Janloon has been indirectly ruled by the Green Bone clans: brotherhoods of mystical warriors empowered by Kekonese jade, which heightens their physical abilities and mental acuity.  The two most powerful clans are the Mountain and No Peak.  Formerly united against the occupation as the One Mountain Society, a generation of peace and economic prosperity has turned them into rivals, warring over control of Janloon’s industries and the national supply of jade.

The novel follows the children of the Kaul family, the leaders of No Peak: Lan, the Pillar (clan patriarch); Hilo, the Horn (chief enforcer); Shae, the prodigal daughter who was groomed as the Weather Man (chief financial officer) before leaving Kekon to make her own life; and Anden, a cousin of these three siblings, who is still training in the mystical arts of the Green Bones.  When the Mountain makes increasingly aggressive bids to seize control of No Peak territory, events escalate into open clan warfare.  The four Kauls must navigate the dangerous waters of this power struggle and make personal sacrifices to protect both their family and the city of Janloon.

RATING: 9.5/10

This novel is a powerful, character-driven story with lots of great action.  Lee does a phenomenal job of building investment in her POV characters and in fleshing out the world such that it is easy to understand the cultural and political dynamics at play.  What really elevates this book, though, is the level of passion and expertise that was poured into every page.  In the Orbit interview at the back of this book, Lee states that she started this novel with nothing but the concept of “wuxia gangster saga”.  She goes into great detail about how she researched the different aspects of the setting.  Her author bio also lists experience in both martial arts and corporate politics that are reflected within the book.

This book succeeds were Notorious Sorcerer failed.  Lee’s passion and experience were molded by discipline into a magnificent whole.  The only reason this book didn’t get a 10/10 were a couple of questionable structural choices and a moment where she dropped the ball on characterization.  Even these are only noticeable because they stand in such sharp contrast to the outstanding quality of everything else.

CONTENT WARNING

This book features multiple sex scenes, all of which are written as erotica.  Unlike many examples of pornography in literature, this is (for better or worse) properly grafted into the narrative.  Lee wove critical characterization details into these scenes.  You cannot skip the scenes outright without harming your understanding of the story.  If you don’t want to read porn, but still want to read this book without missing something important, the best you can hope for is to skim-read through them.  I have no idea whether this grafting was how Lee justified the erotica to herself or if she really wanted the audience to read her fantasies.  Whatever the reason, it is very frustrating.

That said, I do want to give Lee credit where it is due: Jade City is the first book featured on this site to both feature a prominent character with homosexual attraction and not use said character to service a fetish of the author.  This isn’t something that impacts the objective quality of the work; I just personally appreciated that.  Ms. Lee, you get a gold star.

This book also features drug abuse, mutilation, and bloody violence.  As with the violence in The Fall of Reach, I don’t think any of these go beyond what one might typically expect for the subgenre.  If you pick up a wuxia gangster saga, you’re probably already braced for such things.

WHAT I LIKED

Jade City is so phenomenal that it’s hard to limit myself regarding what I liked.  There’s potentially room for a multipart series just to praise every aspect of it.  If people really want to read that, I can certainly revisit it in the future and give it the proper deep dive that it deserves.  For now, here is a selection of the three things that I personally found to be the most superb.

A Time and a Place

While I lack any hard numbers for this, it’s been my personal experience that most secondary worlds (the current term in the publishing industry for settings outside of our own world) featured in fantasy today fall into one of three general periods of technological development.  There’s the massive majority that cover the vast swathe of pre-Industrial (and, usually, pre-gunpowder) history.  There are stories set in steampunk worlds, which often reflect Victorian Era England.  Then there are stories that fall towards the “modern” era, with magic replicating many modern conveniences.  This leaves a swathe of roughly 300 years that is not touched that often in fantasy literature.  (I am speaking strictly of secondary worlds, as urban or historical fantasies appear to have more even coverage of history.)

Jade City is set in a world that sems somewhere between the 1960s and 1980s.  There are cars, motorcycles, machine guns, color television (not shown, but implied by the fact that a black-and-white TV is described as something old), international air travel, and even a lone reference to an air conditioner in a fancy office building.  While there are landline telephones, there are no cell phones or car phones, which aids in preserving tension in scenes that would otherwise be resolved with a quick phone call.

What makes this feel even more unique is that none of this is magitek.  The mystical powers of the Green Bones may make a martial artist bulletproof and borderline telepathic, but it can’t power a generator, send messages, or impart powers onto anyone without the necessary Green Bone bloodline.  This setting is in a state of natural technological progression that is so often overlooked, and it makes the world feel more unique as a result.

Everyman in a Mad World

The POV characters in this story are marvelously written and have relatable, emotionally captivating conflicts.  While they all are worthy of praise, I have a personal soft spot for Anden.  He is the Everyman character living through this conflict, providing an outsider’s perspective on events even as he is dragged into the thick of it by his family ties.

Anden’s life is defined by isolation and personal tragedy.  His mother was a powerful Green Bone who succumbed to a jade sensitivity disorder known as “the Itches” (for the psychosomatic sensation of skin irritation that leads the victims to carve up their own bodies).  So infamous was her descent into madness that she was remembered as the Mad Witch.  The Kaul family took Anden in and considers him part of the family, but he always felt like an outsider; when he began attending a Green Bone training academy, his peers doubled down on this, as his association with the Kauls made them see him as someone of higher status than themselves.  All of this is before he turned eighteen (his age in the story).  Even without the looming clan war, Anden struggles with being a Green Bone.  He fears that he will go the same way as his mother, especially when he sees how powerful he is with jade.  Only loyalty to the Kaul family motivates him to continue.

Then the actual plot starts.  Anden is too young in this book to be directly involved in the clan war (due to strict codes of honor, “aisho”, that govern clan conflicts), but he’s nevertheless targeted by the Mountain in a bid to goad Lan and Hilo.  He watches the Kauls struggle, suffer, and sacrifice throughout the conflict.  Thanks to Anden, the reader gets a perspective of how the clan war impacts the people outside of the immediate danger zone.  His perspective also provides meaningful contrast from Lan, Hilo, and Shae, thereby enhancing their subplots and the decisions that each of them makes.

Sending a Message (Heavy Spoilers)

Jade City is uniquely positioned among the books I’ve reviewed for themes, commentary, and messages.  This time, we have direct confirmation from the author that she intended to fold an idea into her story.

In the Orbit interview, Lee is praised for the diverse characterizations of her strong female characters.  (No capitalization, as the interviewer was neither being ironic nor referring to the trope of the same name.)  I’m not going to do a full breakdown of her answer or the choice of rhetoric for said answer.  I’ll just say that she has successfully convinced me that she is a true believer as far as combating “testosterone-dominated culture” (to use her words) is concerned.

The way that Lee explores this idea is not through lecturing the audience via a protagonist.  She doesn’t inject blunt commentary via tangents in the narrative.  She doesn’t try to make the male characters feminine and the female characters masculine, put down the male characters, or use the male characters to play out an apology fantasy (something we haven’t seen here, but readers of Marvel and DC Comics will know what I’m talking about).  Instead, she explores “testosterone-dominated culture” through the only POV character with established and relatable reasons to notice it, care about it, and feel some grievance towards it: Shae.

Although Shae was groomed to be the Weather Man of No Peak, she always felt the weight of being part of the growing yet still small number of female Green Bones in the wake of the revolution.  This pressure exploded when a romance with a foreigner led to her being disowned by the family.  (This, by itself, didn’t have anything to do with her being a woman.  It just drove a wedge between her and everyone else.)  She discarded her jade and left Janloon to pursue her own life.  When the story begins, she is limping back to Janloon with her tail between her legs, humiliated by her failed romance but still determined to remain independent of both the clan and jade.  She is dismayed when she finds out that Hilo is having her home watched every night by one of the Green Bones under his command.  When she calls him on this, his response is blunt.  There are a couple ways that his answer could be interpreted, but given the ideas Lee wanted to convey, I think that it is appropriate to paraphrase it as, “You want to be treated like a woman instead of a Green Bone.  This is what it means to be treated like a woman in our world.”  This interpretation is reinforced when Shae visits her mother, who basically tells her that her brothers are cogs in a patriarchal system, and thus certain aspects of their behavior are unchangeable facts of life.

(Lee is a more subtle than this.  I’m being heavy-handed with my retelling to illustrate my point.)

Shae isn’t battling the Patriarchy due to ideas that were copy-pasted from the real world without properly accounting for context.  Her grievances with this system are deeply personal and linked to her established life experiences.  There’s even a sense that she doesn’t want to tear down the whole culture, just address balance out the distressing elements.  At most, the acknowledgement of “testosterone-dominated culture” is her identifying a pattern.  This is a thematic discussion that stands on its own, without any context on modern sociopolitical issues.  Even at its most blunt, it does not break immersion.

What I particularly appreciate about Lee’s handling of this message is that she’s not afraid to establish unsympathetic characters who spout the message.  The main antagonist of Jade City is Ayt Mada, the Pillar of the Mountain.  This is a ruthless woman who climbed to the top of a patriarchal system by being borderline depraved in her willingness to use violence.  (For those of you familiar with the Legends material of Star Wars, she’s a lot like Admiral Natasi Daala.)

Ayt is very open about her belief that struggling against the patriarchal system absolves her of any guilt for being a ruthless, murderous, conniving, lying, underhanded, power-hungry megalomaniac.  She blames sexist men and naïve women for forcing her to kill people.  The narrative does not try to frame Ayt as being in the right, or even being worthy of sympathy.  It could have – the scene where Ayt lays bare her mindset was from Shae’s POV, and Ayt was trying to tempt her into betraying the other Kauls and toppling No Peak by appealing to their shared struggles against the system – but it doesn’t.  We’re simply given insight into how the problems that Lee is exploring can spawn villainous individuals.  Both the themes and Ayt’s character are that much richer for it.

WHAT I DISLIKED

Exposition Collision

Lee chooses some very curious moments to do exposition dumps.  She’ll break from scenes in progress to go on tangents about the world or character backstories that are often a page or more in length.  That’s not necessarily a problem, yet there are a few instances where doing so disrupts the tension or pacing.  There are also a few spots where the exposition would have been good to have a few scenes earlier.  The belated delivery makes the information feel extraneous, since surely it would have come earlier if it truly mattered.

The most glaring example of this is Ayt Mada’s backstory.  This comes after Anden has been abducted by the Mountain.  We feel the tension mount as he is brought up to Ayt’s office.  As the office door opens, the scene ends on a cliffhanger … and we’re dropped into nearly two pages of exposition on Ayt’s backstory.  Immediately after, the next scene picks up with Anden stepping through the door of Ayt’s office.

The pacing is disrupted.  The tension is reset.  Neither are unavoidable losses.  There was at least one prior scene where Ayt’s backstory could have been presented (and, as touched upon above, she more or less spills her backstory anyway when trying to justify her actions later in the book).

This is more an organizational problem than anything else.  I think that Lee could have resolved it by just repositioning the exposition dumps occur or by breaking them into smaller pieces to drip-feed information to the audience.

Rushed Climax (Heavy Spoilers)

While Lee does a fantastic job of building audience investment in the characters, the clan war is treated as background noise.  This makes sense to an extent.  From the very beginning, this novel is character-driven, not plot-driven.  The problem is that, as the clan war escalates, things begin to change so rapidly that the situations the characters find themselves in stop making sense.

In one chapter, around the three-quarters mark, No Peak and Mountain are grinding each other down and each taking losses.  A few chapters later, No Peak needs to find a source of income to shore up its losses, and we see Shae implement a desperate gambit to address that problem.  Just a couple chapters after that, No Peak has hit the point of no return, both financially and in the street war between the clans.  Shae’s money-making scheme is seemingly forgotten.

It reads as though the part of the story that focused on the clan war was meant to be two or three times longer, with whole chapters being deleted just to bring down the length.  As a result of this mad dash through the clan war, the lead-up to the finale feels rushed and hollow.  The finale itself is fantastic, but I get the sense that we were supposed to feel the weight of No Peak’s losses going into it.  We simply weren’t given enough to work with on that front.  The ending would have been so much stronger if we were given adequate context to really feel how desperate No Peak had become.

Virtue Signal Man

Anden is my favorite character in this book.  Lee has shown that she can handle messaging very effectively.  I therefore find it doubly distressing that Lee used Anden to virtue signal in one of the most shallow and offense ways that a writer can: tokenization.  She made Anden part of the group whose approval she wanted (in this case, “queers”, to use the book’s own term for anyone with homosexual attraction), then repeatedly hammered in that identity throughout the story, despite it having zero relevance to the plot, his characterization, or even the worldbuilding.  She made Anden queer for no other purpose than to have a queer character – and perhaps more importantly, to make sure her readers know that she, the author, is supportive of homosexuality.

Objectively, this is bad writing.  Mentioning a character trait with no impact upon the story is fine if it’s done once or twice.  People are complicated, after all, and not every aspect of a person is going to be immediately relevant to the situations in which they find themselves.  Putting focus on an irrelevant character trait in six different scenes, for a character who has maybe fourteen scenes total as the POV and only a few others where he otherwise appears, is a waste of time.  It delivers false expectations of payoffs.  When we don’t get the payoffs, we start to question why the author made that trait so important, thereby laying bare the artifice of the narrative.

Subjectively, this destroyed any goodwill that was earned by not exploiting Anden as fetish fuel.  He was instead exploited so that the author could garner personal validation.  Ms. Lee, give me back that gold star from earlier.

Originally, I wrote a detailed dissection of virtue signals in literature and why Anden’s sexual orientation qualifies as one.  This dissection alone quickly exceeded 2,000 words.  That was simply too much attention to give to something that, objectively, is only a small blip in the quality of the story.  I think that the dissection still has merit as an exploration of why virtue signals are a bad thing and how we can avoid them, so I plan to refine it and post it sometime down the line for people to peruse at their discretion.

For now, I’ll leave off by saying that Anden being homosexual wouldn’t have been worth discussing here if Lee had shown the slightest bit of restraint.  She chose to make a big deal out of his inclusion.  Thus, she created a virtue signal that could have so easily been avoided.

LESSONS LEARNED

There is so much that writers, especially writers of fantasy, can learn from this book.  Characters, worldbuilding, themes, how to effectively implement one’s passions into a narrative … it all works.  Even the virtue signaling is a good lesson, even if it is on what not to do.  I could not do all the lessons of this book justice with a summary.  I can only recommend that people read it for themselves to learn by example.

DEALINGS WITH DJINN

The next book in the lineup is S. A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass.  It’s an … interesting read.

I was enjoying The City of Brass at the beginning. It has elements that I feel are genuinely masterful and could have been built upon to produce phenomenal literature. However, problems gradually began to stack up as I progressed. The story became borderline incoherent by the end. What’s more, the book is overloaded with tropes and stylistic choices that make me question why it was marketed as general Fantasy instead of Young Adult.  I don’t mean this as shade against YA; it’s just that it feels like the book fundamentally misunderstands to what audience it is being marketed.

This will be another multipart review.  At this time, I don’t intend to put out another behemoth on the level of The Shadow of the Conqueror or Notorious Sorcerer, but I’ll see how long it actually ends up being once I get going.  I can’t really give an estimate on when it will be released.  I do plan to put out the dissection of virtue signaling in the interim, so look forward to that in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, you can read Jade City. Seriously. It’s worthy of your time.