by Fonda Lee
rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
published: 28th June 2018
spoilers? none
Goodreads
"I could still kill him for you." "Screw you, Hilo," she snapped. "I can kill my ex-boyfriends myself."
tw for extreme violence
Galley provided by publisher
How do you review books that ripped your heart out about halfway through and then continued to batter your emotions mercilessly, all the while laughing with glee? Who knows, but I'm about to try. (Don't be surprised if this review dissolves into incoherency. It's been a week and I'm nowhere near over this book.)
The island of Kekon is controlled by two crime syndicates - clans of Green Bones, who are granted superhuman abilities by the island's magical jade. In the past, the Green Bones protected the island from foreign invasions, but now the clans are involved in commerce, construction and the protection of the districts who pay them. However, the Mountain clan aren't content with the way things are, and want to gain control of the whole island for themselves. Thus begins a clan war.
Jade City is primarily a character-driven novel. There is definitely plot, but it's a fairly slowburning one. The first half of the book is more focused on the Kaul family, of the No Peak clan - Lan, the Pillar (leader), Hilo, the Horn (kind of like the general), Shae, their jadeless sister, and Anden, their cousin/adopted brother. One of the best parts of this book, in my opinion, is the amount of time spent on the family relationships. Yes, they're pretty damn painful, and quite angst-filled (if you've read the Timothy Wilde series by Lyndsay Faye, they're definitely up there competing with that for Most Painful Familial Relationships), but they are also so compelling and there's no one character you'll love to the detriment of all the rest.
As well as there being such good relationships, the characters in themselves are also brilliant. I don't remember the last book in which I loved every single one of the main cast so much. (Which was a Big Problem around a particular part because it absolutely wrecked me. Beware of getting too attached to anyone in this series, I think, is the message to be taken away from that.)
Another wonderful thing about this book was the worldbuilding - ultimately it's a fairly simple fantasy world, but it felt so realistic and, to be honest, it's probably some of the best worldbuilding I've read in a fantasy novel of any sort. Everything just fits so seamlessly together.
If there's any complaint I have about Jade City, it's just that it was fairly slow up until That Particular Scene Which I Like To Pretend Didn't Happen. Yeah, the characters and the worldbuilding made up for it, and this is only a really minor complaint, but I did feel there needed to be a bit more action before the halfway point. Like I said though: this is a really minor issue. In the end, it didn't make a difference to how I rated the book.
So now all I have to do is wait (suffer/attempt to recover) until Jade War comes out.
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