A review by JC Kang Mean Girls meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon…on ice! (or I, Tonya meets Jin Yong) As an wuxia film aficionado, and the parent of two competitive ice skaters (word of caution to those of you with young kids: ice skating is expensive!), Henry Lien’s debut middle-grade (MG) fantasy, Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword,…
Category: Review
The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang
A review by JC Kang The Poppy War’s darkness meets The Last Airbender’s elemental magic. Being a second world conflict between China and Japan, M. L. Wang’s The Sword of Kaigen brought to my mind R. F. Kuang’s meteoric debut, The Poppy War. With all the hype surrounding it, The Poppy War was my most anticipated release of 2018, but one…
Nightblade by Ryan Kirk
A review by JC Kang As a fan of epic fantasy with diverse casts, I always saw Ryan Kirk’s Nightblade atop the Asian Myths and Legends charts on Amazon, reminding me I needed to finish it. Though it had been sitting on my Kindle for years, and I had tried several times to make it through the…
The Poppy War by RF Kuang
A review by JC Kang Today is May 4, coincidentally the 99th anniversary of the first popular protest in China’s history. Due to the somber tone of The Poppy War, I am eschewing my usual levity in this review. In my review of Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, I proclaimed to be an avid student of Napoleonic…
Jade City by Fonda Lee
A review by JC Kang Aficionados of Hong Kong Cinema, hear me out: Imagine Chow Yun-Fat in one of his classic ‘90s Triad movies, but give him the superhuman martial skills from the Show Brothers’ Golden Age of Wuxia. Add in the complex plotting and backstabbing of Game of Thrones, and you have Fonda Lee’s Jade City….
Never Die by Rob J. Hayes
A review by JC Kang “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets The Walking Dead.” As an ethnic Chinese martial arts practitioner, I have a love-hate relation with Wuxia. My first introduction to the genre came not through literature, but through Shaw Brothers movies. One of my favorite ages of cinema is 1990s Hong Kong, where Jet Li rose…
Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn
A review by JC Kang Japanese Game of Thrones. I was first drawn to Japanese samurai stories as a nine-year-old, when the miniseries based on James Clavell’s Shogun graced the little screen for five straight nights. Besides being the first time I ever saw suggestion of the hanky-panky happening on television, what struck me the most was…
Unsouled by Will Wight
A review by JC Kang The Monkey King meets Up. For a novel entitled Unsouled, Will Wight’s prototypical story has a lot of soul. I’d picked it up a couple of years ago, but each time I’d tried to start, like many books buried on the slopes of Mount TBR, I never made it past the first…
Nightblade’s Vengeance by Ryan Kirk
A review by JC Kang Shogun meets the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. With over a thousand reviews on Amazon, Ryan Kirk’s Nightblade trilogy is perhaps the most popular Asian fantasy, with the exception of Will Wight’s Cradle series. I had listened to book one a couple of years ago, and while I enjoyed the characters, story,…
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
A review by JC Kang Reviewer’s Note: Upon finishing this novella, which took six days the first time around, I immediately wrote an initial review where I rated it 6/10 stars. Then, I re-read it, knowing how it ended. Two hours later, I was done, and was smacking my head at having missed the subtlety….