Pearl City (The Phoenix Hoard, #3) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #3
Pages: 400
Length: 12 hours and 38 minutes
Published by Sixth Moon Press LLC, Tor Books on July 15, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Blade. Butcher. Thief. Worldbreaker.
Emiko Soong has been called many things but Worldbreaker is the worst.
She unmasked the General and returned to San Francisco where her power is greatest. But the city, once her sanctuary from Jiaren intrigues, turns into her living nightmare. Clan war tears at the seams and her life becomes a treacherous quicksand of friend and foe. Unsure of who to trust, Emiko finds herself more alone than ever.
When an ancient power rips through the Realm to land in her city, the General will stop at nothing to take this power for his own. Emiko must face her past, her present, and her future, as she races to stop the General.
Is Emiko’s fate written to be the destroyer of worlds, or can she chart her own course to save her family?Phoenix Hoard
#1 Ebony Gate #2 Blood Jade #3 Pearl City
My Review:
Pearl City is the end of the vast, sprawling, truly epic saga that began in Ebony Gate, and continued in Blood Jade. It’s marvelous and utterly compelling every step of Emiko Soong’s winding, twisted, churning way – and I was left both sad and smiling at the end.
Sad because the journey is over – at least for the reader. Smiling because Emiko’s hard road and long dark nights of the soul have come to a hopeful and hopefully happy ending for her, her friends and loved ones, and especially her city, San Francisco.
(This is also a huge hint not to start here. Start with Ebony Gate. Please. Soon. This thing is marvelous, absorbing and utterly compelling every step of the way.)
The story picks up right where the previous book, Blood Jade, left off. And it picks up with Emiko in the exact same position she was in when the series opened in Ebony Gate. Everybody hates and fears her because of the abilities she has revealed. And she’s just discovered, yet again, that her parents have lied to her about, well, pretty much damn everything.
She’s always believed that she was ‘less than’. That her dragon talents were minimal and that she was a failure among her people. That her only way of serving her family was as a nearly mundane blade of vengeance wielded by her powerful father. And that her mother was so disappointed in her that she spent most of Emiko’s life far away on endless missions.
Then again, Emiko has also believed all the legends about her people’s mysterious and powerful Dragon Gods, left guarding the gate to this world so that their people, Emiko’s ancestors, could escape the destruction of the Realm from which they all draw their power.
Not much of what Emiko believed turns out to be true. Her talent is so dangerous that it was deliberately broken when she was so young she doesn’t remember. She’s never been a failure – but she’s certainly been emotionally manipulated to believe that she is – and that damage lingers.
Their gods were tyrants. Tyrants they fled in order to escape slavery. Masters who want their hoard, their hoard of sycophants, servants and slaves, back under their dominion.
Emiko is as certain of that as she is anything, because the dragon people may be descended from dragons, but they are just as capable of self-deception and hubris as any garden-variety human. And one of them has connived and conspired to let one of the dragons in.
It’s up to Emiko to send that dragon back where he came from. Before he destroys her, her people, her city, and her world. Because Emiko is the Sentinel of San Francisco, and the city, and ALL its people, magical and mundane, friend and enemy alike, are hers to protect and defend.
Or die trying.
Escape Rating A: I’ve been looking forward to this book for most of a year at this point, because the previous book, Blood Jade, while it didn’t end in a cliffhanger did end on an obvious precipice that the world was just not done messing with Emiko yet. I NEEDED to find out how it ended.
But I also had to wait for the audiobook, read by Natalie Naudus, who is the perfect voice for Emiko. The whole series is written from Emiko’s first-person perspective, so we’re inside her sometimes very messy and often self-deprecating head the whole time. We’re there WITH her in that fantastic way that only happens when there’s perfect synergy between the character and the narrator providing their voice.
(However, I need to insert a kind of trigger warning here. Emiko goes through some seriously terrible stuff in this story. She’s already in a lot of emotional pain, she suffers from a hell of a lot of pre-installed angst, AND she’s forced into battle after battle where she gets deliberately tormented and grievously injured over and over again. Experiencing all of that from inside her head is a LOT. Not that it all doesn’t happen in text, but it’s just that much more immediate and visceral when you’re hearing her voice in your own head. There were points where I wanted to scream and/or hurl right along with Emiko.)
The story in this final volume is also a LOT, and an awful lot happens, a lot of it is awful, and Emiko is always right in the middle of it. There was so much going on, the way that the hits just kept on coming and it seemed like the situation was getting worse with no hope in sight that I had moments where I wondered whether or not the authors were going to need another book to resolve everything.
But it does come round right in ways that perfectly fit the world and the person that Emiko has become, yet still manage to surprise and delight the reader as the tide finally turns and Emiko comes into her own in ways that neither she, nor we, ever expected.
One minor, discordant note in this story, at least for this reader/listener, was the reveal of the true story – or at least the truth-y story – about the true history of the dragon gods reminds me a lot of the Evanuris in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Emiko’s naivete about that story doesn’t ring as true as the rest of her character, not just because she’s old enough to know that all origin stories are full of holes and made up out of the whole cloth to serve the tale’s original tellers, but also because by this point she’s already discovered that a rather large number of the stories she’s been told about herself, her family and her people were not true at all. I admit my perspective on this was colored by the speech and mannerisms of the asshole who explained it all to Emiko in oh-so-condescending tones. He was so obviously high on his own hubris that I couldn’t take his words seriously. His actions, very, but his words, not so much at all. Howsomever, this might be a ‘me’ thing and not a ‘you’ thing. In other words, your reading mileage may vary.
In the end, I’m so very glad I picked up this trilogy, because damn but it’s been an awesome ride. It also left me with the same epic book hangover as Jade Lee’s Green Bone Saga – which the Phoenix Hoard still reminds me of very much – as well as Brian McClellan’s Glass Immortals because the characters are just the same sort of misfit heartbroken heartbreakers.
One final note, not exactly a spoiler but more of a hint. ALL the titles of the books in this series, AND the series title itself, are all clues about the stories within. Awesome, marvelous, fascinating, fantastic stories filled with characters that leap straight off the page and into the reader’s heart. Including the glorious and magical city of San Francisco.
