Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen

Amber Chen’s Of Jade and Dragons is the sort of novel I would have loved back when I was fourteen. At its best, it’s a YA Mulan with delightful worldbuilding and a compelling mystery to be solved, but at its worst… well, we’ll get into that.

Eighteen-year-old Aihui Ying is the oldest daughter of an engineer who left the Engineers Guild a long time ago and now lives with his family in a rural village. Ying shares his fascination with building mechanical devices, from a fan that shoots darts (a success) to silk-and-bamboo wings that will enable her to fly (not such a success).

But one day, a scar-faced assassin attacks her father. She tries to fight the assassin but succeeds only in tearing something off his cloak – a jade pendant carved with a dragon. Her father dies, but first he gives Ying his journal and warns her to burn it. Naturally she looks through the journal, which contains notes and sketches for powerful weapons such as cannons. And since the dragon is the symbol of the Jade Empire, the enemy of her people (the Antarans), she suspects her father’s murder was intended to give the Empire an advantage in a battle to come.

Ying’s older brother, Wen, tells her there’s nothing more to be done, since a search for the assassin has proved fruitless. So Ying travels to the capital city, Fei, to get more information from the Engineers Guild. But as a girl, she’ll be turned out summarily. That gives her the idea to disguise herself as a boy and enter the apprenticeship trials for the Guild. There’ll be stiff competition, and she’ll need to avoid drawing attention to herself as she investigates her father’s death. But she’s got his journal, and she has some unexpected help from Ye-yang, a prince who saves her from an attack by a chimera, and who seems to be oddly interested in her.

The story’s worldbuilding is excellent, and it feels authentically silkpunk, from the weaponized fan to the bamboo tubes shuttling food orders from tables to kitchen in taverns. My favorite was the chimera, a cyborg fox with a mechanical eye. I would love to read more about that.

Unfortunately, the plot slows down once Ying becomes an apprentice. After that, she gets pulled in multiple directions at once – find father’s killer, pass apprentice tests, keep other apprentices unsuspicious about her, deal with attraction to Ye-yang – so there are stretches when Dad is relegated to the back burner, only for some new development to usher him back to the priority list. Like in Harry Potter, there’s a master who takes a swift dislike to Ying (plus the secret journal which helps her), and her romance with Ye-yang is very Cinderella-esque. I was starting to feel that this was all predictable when there were a couple of great twists, which saved the book from a C grade.

And while I liked the older-sister relationship Ying develops with another apprentice, the other characters didn’t make much of an impression. We never get Ye-yang’s perspective, so he seems like the typical cool, enigmatic, handsome aristocrat who appears when necessary to help the heroine out, then retires so she can retake center stage. Then towards the end, he does something that torpedoed him as the love interest. Readers sticking with the series might find him more developed in later books, because someone as ambitious as he is could be either a hero or an outright villain. He has a lot of potential as a character. I just didn’t like him as a love interest.

Finally, the heroine-disguises-herself-as-a-boy-so-she-can-do-something-forbidden-to-girls is a pretty tired trope unless the story does something new with it, and that doesn’t happen here. I didn’t feel the take-home message of this is that girls should have the same opportunities as boys. Instead, the message seems to be that only one girl is exceptional enough to play at a male level. Ying’s friendships are all with other boys, and even the revelation of her gender occurs off-screen and without consequences. Oh, and one last thing – the Chinese steampunk atmosphere is kind of undercut by comments like “That’s bullshit” and “they have sticks up their asses”.

In summary, there’s a lot to like in Of Jade and Dragons, but I’m not in a rush to pick up the sequel without reading a few reviews first. It gets a qualified recommendation.

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