Author: Alma Alexander
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WORTHY!
erratum:
p102 "...they would all sit subside on the ground..." I suspect that either 'sit' or 'subside' is superfluous and didn't get deleted when the other word was substituted.
p337 "...all except Cai's death, with she left..." should be "...all except Cai's death, which she left..."
p345 "...and if you friend is right..." should be "...and if your friend is right..."
In some ways this novel reminds me of Kiyohara Nagiko, aka Sei Shōnagon, Japanese author of the thousand-year-old The Pillow Book (makura no sōshi), and of Lady Murasaki, aka Murasaki Shikibu, author of the equally ancient The Tale of Genji. Not long ago I read The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby, a fictionalized version based on Lady Murasaki's own diary, and it was charming. I put this novel in a class with that one. It has that same 'different era' vibe, and the same idealistic view of life in the Far East. I recommend reading that novel, too, especially because it's based on an actual person and actual events.
Alma Alexander put a heck of a lot of effort into this and it shows. This novel is poetical, easy on the ear, and engrossing, but it is also long and complex. Perhaps too long, but not too complex if you pay attention! She does jump around like a rabbit however (does like a rabbit, bucks like a rabbit? - I use the word advisedly given the behavior of the emperor in this novel!), going from one character to another, with some of them carrying the story for a long time whereas others appear only briefly here and there.
The novel is set, effectively, in ancient China, but Alexander removes it from that reality by naming the nation Syai. She also employs some ancient Chinese realities, such as the secret language, named Nüshu (nü meaning 'woman' and the rest meaning writing). This was employed between women in China until the last speaker of it, Yang Huanyi, died in 2004, although who she talked to in those waning years is not known! In this novel Nüshu is renamed jin-ashu, and the Chinese concept on non-blood sisterhood, named LaoTong ("old sames") is used under the name of jin-shei. Two such sisters would be jin-shei-bao to each other.
Tai is the daughter of a palace seamstress until a chance meeting with Antian, a member of the royal family, and a consequent chat about art and poetry leads the princess to offer Tai a pact of jin-shei - unbreakable sisterhood - between them. Unfortunately, this tie with Tai is not to last since virtually the entire royal family is killed in an earthquake in their mountain retreat.
Tai survives, and Antian with her dying breath, begs her to take care of her sister. The only sister of which Tai is aware is Liudan, the one who stayed at home and therefore never experienced the earthquake. She is an unwanted third-in-line sister who is resentful that she never had a shot at the throne - until now, but when she steps up, she does so in grand style, refusing to take a husband, and choosing to rule as an unmarried "dragon empress".
In chapter three, Alexander jumps from the story of the very rocky relationship between Tai and Liudan and introduces us to two more girls: Xaforn, in her early teens, is an orphan who is training very hard to be the youngest inductee into the palace guard. Xaforn ends up unexpectedly befriending Qiaan, the daughter of one of the guard captains, who herself has no interest in joining the military.
Continuing these abrupt jumps, we're next introduced to Nhia, who has a 'withered leg', but who is mobile. She spends a lot of her time at the temple wasting her life begging for the non-existent gods to help her, but she actually becomes the author of her own destiny, as all people do, no gods needed. One day in the temple grounds, she's sitting next to an acolyte, and a woman comes asking for advice. While the acolyte is still pondering what to say, Nhia offers a story which brings solace to the woman, and from this humble start, she grows to the point where she is telling stories to children in the temple grounds even though she has no official right to be there.
Nhia is befriended by Khailin, who has her own agenda to get herself an education and who sees Nhia as the vehicle by which to achieve her aim, but the two become friends and jin-shei. This jin-shei spreads amongst these women like wildfire, each of them slowly becoming more and more entangled with the others like elementary particles in some physics experiment. Two more girls show up, in the form of Tammary, and Yuet, the healer's apprentice.
The way Alexander develops this is very natural and organic. There is no falsehood to this story - no "Wait, what?" moments. As I mentioned, it takes longer than I think it ought, but she tells a very engrossing story and tells it beautifully.
Things become complicated in unexpected ways, such as when the mysterious and artistic Tammary shows up, living with the traveler people, and such as when Khailin ends up married to a sorcerer and becomes imprisoned in his literally living house, and such as when Yuet starts noticing the remarkable likeness between Qianna and the young empress Liudan....
One of my pet peeves with this is not with the novel per se, but with the pinyin pronunciation, which was formalized in the late fifties by the Chinese government to facilitate representing Chinese words in Arabic script. God only knows who actually came up with this nonsensical system, but it's completely nuts.
Alexander gives a brief overview of pinyin in the back of the novel, but it should have been in the front, because the names, the way they're written, make zero sense and are in fact completely misleading as compared with the actual pronunciation. Here are the eight characters again, with the pronunciation for each name:
As Written _ _ As Pronounced
Khailin _ _ _ Kay Leen
Liudan _ _ _ _ Lee O'Dan
Nhia _ _ _ _ _ N'ya
Qiaan _ _ _ _ Chiaan
Tai _ _ _ _ _ Tay
Tammary _ _ _ Tammary
Xaforn _ _ _ _ Shaforn
Yuet _ _ _ _ _ Y'et
Nuts, right? As I mentioned in my review of Between Two Worlds which also had pronunciation issues, the only important thing in this is to make the name sound right! Since there's no connection at all between Chinese scripts (or in this case Syai script!) and the Arabic alphabet used in western nations, there's no reason at all to depict the words in any way other than phonetically.
But that's a minor point. I loved this story and I highly recommend it. Alexander is one of the rare YA authors who knows how to write intelligent and engrossing female characters who are strong and memorable and who are not in the least dependent upon men to validate their existence. She also has a trilogy which is really good (yes, from me, who detests trilogies!)
