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Jade City The Green Bone Saga Fonda Lee Books

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Jade City The Green Bone Saga Fonda Lee Books

"Jade City" is one of this year's Nebula-award nominees for best novel. It's also a charismatic, inventive opening to a new fantasy saga, one set in an imaginary country where jade endows the Kekonese with magical, superhuman powers. I like the fusion of martial arts, fantasy powers, and a modern Asian setting. I like the originality of the jade-based fantastical element. Although there are many grim moments, the story has an underlying sense of adventure.

The book switches between approximately ten point-of-view characters, with most of the page-count divided between four family members. While I grew sympathetic toward all four main characters, it took me a while to do so. I think I'd have cared for them sooner if they themselves had been more sympathetic to those around them. Late in the book, one of the characters thinks, "At first, her decisions had been about herself ... and in the end, they had been about more than that." Now that I am attached to the characters, I think I will enjoy book two all the more.


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Jade City The Green Bone Saga Fonda Lee Books Reviews

Check out the awards and accolades Jade City got and you won't need me to tell you this is a book worth reading. I hope some movie production company snatches it up quick, because it totally would make a great movie central family with sibling rivalry, scenic city backdrops, hand to hand combat, mystical religious figures, and of course, the glamorous shine of Jade.

The Kaul family runs the No Peak clan on the island of Kekon. The Ayt family runs their main rival, Mountain clan. The clans are made up of women and men who have the right balance of sensitivity and tolerance to the bioenergetical properties of Jade mined from their island. By wearing Jade, the warriors (Green Bones) can do things like make themselves lighter, deflect, and steel themselves against harm.

The patriarch of the family is fading, he has passed leadership down to his sons Lan and Hilo, but the Mountain is beginning to skirmish at the borders of their territory. And despite the traditional hoarding of jade by both clans, more and more is showing up in foreign territories. There is going to be a grand, bloody reckoning between the clans that will shake up Jade City's allegiances.

This is a mafia family story. Really its about political manuevering, the differences between Hilo and Lan and their recently returned sister Shae, wuxia-style brawling in the streets between jade wearing warriors, and strategy.

The world is pretty meticulously conceptualized, history, foreign territories, religion and all. Superbly drawn. I wish we could have followed Lan and Hilo more deeply, but there are so many fun tangents we are pulled away from them by a lucky street rat, the Kaul's adopted sibling, the Deitists religion, even the Green Bones training academy really deserves at least half a book in and of itself.

There's literally too much at times. And once in a while the author throws in a legend in full narrator style that i tended to skim a little because the action with the kauls was so compelling. But that's a matter of personal taste and I can imagine readers who will love the mythos woven in like that.

It took me a little while to get around to this book, and its actually a bit ironic that I'm reading this while some Asian-American lead casts are making cultural waves in movies and TV as well. I approve of it all. You should read this book. If you liked The Godfather, if you ever watched Crouching Tigers, Hidden Dragons, or if you just enjoy richly descriptive fantasy.
Fonda Lee is the much-loved author of a number of fantastic novels, and it's no wonder that her SFF epic Jade City caught the eye of the Nebula award committee. Jade City is eye-catching indeed, with an exciting premise, a fresh new type of magic, gangsters, politics, family, betrayal, and ... mining? The back cover promises more than enough to have this book flying off the shelves - and boy does it deliver!

Literally by page 3 I was already blown away by Lee's world building. You can read more about her take on world building in SFF in this interview over on the Barnes and Noble SFF blog, and you should - because she is a master. There were a couple of places where I found I was asking questions about "how things worked," only to find that she answered them 10-20 pages later. The world she's created for Jade City is wonderful, inspiring, and I'm truly glad it looks like we're all going to get at least two more books in which to explore it.

No review of this book could get far without talking about the magic in this book, so that's where I'll start. Lee introduces readers to a modern world in which some people (natives of the fictitious island of Kekon) can access magical superhuman powers by wearing, or being very near, the gemstone jade. Of course, there's a whole culture around how, and by whom, jade is worn, and Lee uses this to great effect both overtly (in describing how characters feel about their jade and that of others) and subtly (as she teaches us as readers the meaning of jade early on, she empowers us to draw our own interpretations and conclusions later on in the narrative). The loving way she mentions jade - how it catches the light, how it swings on a chain, how it sits in the handle of a blade or the setting of a bracelet, how it glows against the skin - feels casual, beautiful, and insidious. In a word magical.

One of the more masterful things Lee has done in Jade City is marry old-world (fictitious) cultural tradition with modern globalism, politics, and business, in a way that feels absolutely real, relatable, and truly fascinating. This marriage isn't seamless, and Lee uses that friction to add depth to the world, to motivate her characters, and to help readers invest in the narrative on multiple levels at once. Yet somehow, though she uses Taiwanese, Japanese, and other east Asian imagery and cultural tropes (traditional and modern) as touchstones in her fictional nation of Kekon, they don't feel like tropes.When I picture the traditional architecture's sloping roofs I feel like I'm borrowing from my exposure to Japanese architecture to inform my understanding of Kekonese tradition. Similarly, when Lee describes her leather-clad street gangs' wild hairstyles, the fact that I'm picturing a Bosozoku pompadour feels coincidental - rather than as though she's borrowing too heavily from current cultures.

Jade City's greatest strength, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with all those wild and wonderful promises from its back cover (though have I stressed yet just how well Lee delivers on all those promises?). It's all about the main characters. They're all so epically, unbelievably, human. The main characters, Lan, Hilo, and Shae, are each in their own right some of the most fully realized and deeply individual characters I've ever encountered in speculative fiction. For the three of them to make up an ensemble cast is almost overwhelming. Their flaws don't feel like plot devices, their mistakes aren't convenient, and though they're all incredibly strong jade-wearers none of them feel like any kind of god-mode Gary Stu. And the way she illustrates so many rarely-explored facets of masculinity ... a whole article could be written on her characters' masculinity alone. She does what so many authors fail to do - writes fully-rounded characters who each own their own kinds of masculinity. I can honestly say I've never encountered another cast of characters like this, and I'm moved by it.

This isn't to say that I have no bones to pick with this book. On the contrary, while I clearly think Lee has done a fantastic job in creating Jade City, I'm not an overly large fan of her writing. In general, her narrative voice is simpler than I prefer - offering many short, choppy sentences rather than indulging in more complex phrases. Where this stood out most to me was the way in which it hampered what could have been a much more poetic descriptive style. There were a few times where her poeticism came through for me, but for the most part it fell flat because of her narrative voice.

Another quibble is one I've already alluded to. While she did get around to answering all my questions about the world and its workings, I was distracted again and again, was pulled out of the story because I was missing vital information about the background or setting. While this is normally not something I'd mention about a book, it ended up having a significant impact on my enjoyment of this book in particular. Especially in the first 100 pages or so, her use of undefined terms or references to unknown groups and affiliations became dense enough that whole paragraphs read like buzzword-salad. Stick with it, though, because the payoff is completely worth it.

In the end, I'm very impressed by Fonda Lee's Jade City and am prepared to recommend it to just about everybody - and I'll happily wait until 2019 for my next visit to Kekon.
"Jade City" is one of this year's Nebula-award nominees for best novel. It's also a charismatic, inventive opening to a new fantasy saga, one set in an imaginary country where jade endows the Kekonese with magical, superhuman powers. I like the fusion of martial arts, fantasy powers, and a modern Asian setting. I like the originality of the jade-based fantastical element. Although there are many grim moments, the story has an underlying sense of adventure.

The book switches between approximately ten point-of-view characters, with most of the page-count divided between four family members. While I grew sympathetic toward all four main characters, it took me a while to do so. I think I'd have cared for them sooner if they themselves had been more sympathetic to those around them. Late in the book, one of the characters thinks, "At first, her decisions had been about herself ... and in the end, they had been about more than that." Now that I am attached to the characters, I think I will enjoy book two all the more.