Genre: Asian inspired fantasy

A+ #AudioBookReview: Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A+ #AudioBookReview: Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee BakerJapanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: purchased from Audible, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, ghosts, Gothic, historical fantasy, horror
Pages: 352
Length: 10 hours and 19 minutes
Published by Hanover Square Press, Harlequin Audio on April 14, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In this lyrical, wildly inventive horror novel interwoven with Japanese mythology, two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.
October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn't always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.
October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.
One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.
Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.

My Review:

It begins, not with a murder, but with Lee Turner cleaning up after a murder he doesn’t remember committing. He doesn’t even remember WHY he murdered his college roommate, all he knows is that he emerged from a fugue state in the midst of cleaning up AFTER the murder.

Lee doesn’t even remember what he did with the body. Just that it’s all his fault. Like so many of the other inexplicable things in his life are. Including, at times, his very existence.

Because nothing about any of it makes any sense, Lee runs away. He can’t explain his actions – not even to himself. He certainly can’t make up a convincing story for anyone else.

So he leaves his studies at New York University and flies halfway around the world to Japan, where his father has just bought an old samurai house that could be politely described as a fixer-upper near the tiny village of Chiran. No one has lived in the house hidden by sword ferns for at least 50 years. For James Turner, an American scholar of Japanese history, it seemed perfect. And affordable on an academic’s salary.

For Lee, it seems like a perfect place to hide.

Until a light shines behind the closet door in Lee’s room. A door that he knows opens on a concrete wall. Except when it doesn’t. When it turns into a mirror image of Lee’s room, and a samurai steps through the door and raises her katana for a killing strike.

And everything Lee thought he knew dissolves into a truth he’s been hiding from himself since he was 12 years old. Since the day his mother ran away. Or was kidnapped by human traffickers. Or was murdered by someone Lee can’t allow himself to blame.

Escape Rating A+: Parts of this were not quite what I was expecting, but all of the parts were marvelous so I’m really happy I dove right into this one – even if it wasn’t a book I was inclined to either read or listen to just before bed.

Because I absolutely was expecting it to be creepy – and it certainly is that. But I’m not much of a horror reader so I needed the creep to kind of sidle up to me and loom over me – and not be drenched in either blood and gore or insane serial killer madness. And I got exactly what I was looking for on both those counts. Even though there did turn out to be plenty of blood after all.

This is a story that feels a lot like a really dark fantasy that leaned so far over the line into outright horror that it fell into a bed of razor sharp blades and leaked blood and viscera all over the place. Even though it starts not with a bloody murder – but with cleaning up after a bloody murder.

What gave the story both its depth and its compulsive readability is the way that the horrors, which are certainly there, are wrapped up in time travel and misplaced myths and a whole dark well full to the brim with ghost stories.

The two sides of the story coin – who don’t know that they are that AND two beads endlessly circling a moebius strip – are Lee Turner in the fall of 2026 and Iwasaki Sen in the fall of 1877. They ALSO don’t know that they’re sharing both a room and a fate.

It’s not so much Lee’s story that drags the reader in – even with his missing memories of murdering his roommate and the voice of his missing mother who haunts his every moment. Instead, it’s Sen’s story as the daughter of the last samurai that draws both Lee and the reader into the creeping dread of the story – even though we all know that Sen’s days are numbered in more ways than one.

The atmosphere, the vibe of Japanese Gothic captured me in the same way that Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth did a few years ago. It’s not just the Japanese setting and the creepy haunted house, but the way that the secrets seem to ooze out from the walls and the floors and the contemporary occupants laugh at ghost stories and pretend it’s not going to happen to them

At the same time, Sen’s half of the story struck a similar chord to the videogame Ghost of Tsushima. Because the subtext in both stories is wrapped around the romanticized code of the samurai, and the way that rigid adherence to that code – along with an unwillingness to lose the privileges that resulted from being a samurai – brought about their downfall. Even though Jin Sakai’s story in Ghost and Sen’s half of the story in Gothic are set nearly six centuries apart, that unwillingness to bend no matter how high the cost underlies both stories.

There’s certainly horror on both sides of the story, but it’s not the same horror, even though it is. Lee’s horror isn’t the horror of the murder he committed that he can’t remember, it’s the horror of the murder of his mother that he can’t remember. Sen’s horror isn’t the horror of being trapped in a prison of her father’s making – although she is – but it’s the horror of knowing she’s trapped in a fate that can’t be changed and nothing she does could possibly matter. And that anything and everything she’s done to gain her father’s regard has never mattered at all.

And it’s wrapped up in the sorrow and the shared pathos that their time-tossed mirror is the only one who can see them for who they really are – in spite of all the circumstances that seemed stacked against them ever meeting in the first place. Even for just this one brief week outside time for them both.

I got caught in this story because of its two timelines more than I did for the separate horrors in each. I found the time-travel aspects mysterious and mesmerizing as they happened, and was captivated by the way the whole story ended in myth and regret.

I was beyond grateful that this never tripped over into being a “star-crossed romance” because that was just SO not the point and it would have spoiled the whole thing and made it utterly mundane if it had gone there in the end. Instead, Lee and Sen are each other’s “person” – in ways that neither recognizes until the very end of both their journeys.

Ultimately, it’s a story about making and breaking myths – and not any of the myths that the reader thinks it’s going to be at the beginning. And the whole thing is just that much better in the hands – or specifically the voice, of its fantastic, perfect narrator, Natalie Naudus. I was always going to read this book, but I chose the audio specifically for her, and she made a great story even better.

Grade A #BookReview: A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: A Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi VoA Long and Speaking Silence (The Singing Hills Cycle, #7) by Nghi Vo
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, fantasy
Series: Singing Hills Cycle #7
Pages: 144
Published by Tordotcom on May 5, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From USA Today bestselling author Nghi Vo comes a beautiful new tale in the Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle, drawn from the earliest days of Chih's career as a wandering cleric.
"Nghi Vo is so good."—NPR on The Brides of High Hill
Every story begins somewhere.
On the banks of the Ya-lé River, the town of Luntien gathers to celebrate the start of the rainy season, but the celebration is marred by the arrival of refugees from the sea. Everyone has a story about the foreigners newly in their midst—lazy, violent, unwanted—while the refugees themselves grieve the loss of the home they loved.
Cleric Chih, very recently still Novice Chih, is also a stranger in Luntien. A moment of carelessness and bad luck leaves them waiting tables as they struggle to establish themself as a real cleric. A cleric’s job is to listen and record, but the stories emerging in Luntien are ugly and violent, as hard to predict as the river itself. With their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant by their side, Chih must help the refugees while also unraveling a mystery that may have roots in their own faraway home in the abbey of Singing Hills.
In the seventh entry of the award-winning Singing Hills series, we meet Chih and Almost Brilliant just beginning their journey together as Chih assumes their place on the road and in the world.
The novellas of the Singing Hills series are standalone stories linked by the Cleric Chih, and may be read in any order.

My Review:

This review is a bit early, as it won’t be out for another couple of weeks. But that’s fitting as this story takes place early in Cleric Chih’s career. Not just before the events of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but before Chih became the more-or-less, usually, mostly, polished and above all experienced Cleric readers of the series have come to know and love.

A Long and Speaking Silence is a portrait of Chih as a young, naive and inexperienced Cleric, so wet behind the ears that they still look for an elder standing beside them when someone calls them “Cleric Chih” when they still mostly think of themselves as “Novice Chih”.

Chih’s circumstances in this story make that point extremely clear to everyone – especially Chih. Not that their companion, the neixin Almost Brilliant, will ever let them forget what an idiot they’ve been. Or are being.

Chih is stuck in the town of Luntien waiting tables at a busy restaurant during the town’s busiest season. Chih was robbed of the packet carrying their expense money, so they’ve been forced to earn their own keep until their pay packet catches up to them.

It’s a learning experience for Chih in more ways than one. Certainly, they learn how to wait tables and serve customers while being run off their feet – and without breaking half the crockery along the way. They learn to live by their own wits. They learn how to make friends and be part of a group that is made up of all sorts of people from all kinds of backgrounds with all sorts of interesting stories.

And they learn that the collection of those stories that is the mission of the Singing Hills Abbey will go a whole lot more smoothly if they let the stories come to them instead of pestering people to tell those stories at a time and circumstance of Chih’s choosing instead of their own. It’s a difficult lesson for Chih, one that they’ve learned by the time we met them in that first book. In this story we get to see how that lesson began to take root.

Mostly, however, they learn the beginnings of patience, as well as the hard lesson that a closed mouth gathers no feet. Or fists.

Escape Rating A: This story, and the whole Singing Hills Cycle of which it is but the latest – and earliest – chapter, is a story that grows upon the reader and in its telling at the same time. But even though this is a very early story in Chih’s career, it continues the trend of the series as a whole – that Chih has moved from being outside of each story, a mere chronicler, to being the central character.

The story that Chih is the center of may be their work waiting tables, but it’s not the important bit except in its effect on Chih. Although it certainly is part of the lesson they need to learn in Luntien.

The greater story in the town is a refugee crisis. And if those parts of the story sound familiar, they should because they are universal in the broader canvas even if they are different in the details. Luntien is flooded with refugees from the Verdant Islands, displaced by weather and war.

The refugees are more than willing to work, but there are more of them than the town can absorb. There’s nowhere for them to go, they’re forced to live on charity while being resented on all sides. It’s a familiar pattern, and it’s happening all over the world.

It’s turning Luntien into a powder keg. Chih only wants to help, but most of what they do is make things worse by jumping in too fast and putting their foot – both their feet – into their mouth. They mean well but they’re mostly not doing well at it.

(It’s a bit like a training montage in many stories, in that Chih thinks they see what’s wrong, tries and fails to fix something, makes a mess of it, retreats to try again, and slowly learns their own lesson. That they need to listen before they talk. That it’s not about them, it’s about the people who need their help – even if that help is just to get their stories told.)

Chih is also trying to fulfill their own mission, to collect stories. And it’s only once they stop talking and start listening – after carving out a bit of space to do their own work – that they discover the bittersweet ending to a story they never imagined would be waiting for them.

In the end, this seventh entry in the long-running Singing Hills Cycle novella series was an absorbing story of youthful impatience, painful lessons and hidden heartbreak. The series as a whole has been a thoughtful and thought-provoking delight. I’m just sad that I’ll have to wait another whole year (if not more) for Cleric Chih’s next story.

A- #BookReview: The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina Kwan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina KwanThe Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina Kwan
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, romantasy
Pages: 320
Published by S&S/Saga Press on February 24, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the author of The Last Dragon of the East comes a sweeping fantasy adventure with a dash of romance between a nine-tailed fox and the demon-hunter who captures her, banished to the underworld together and forced to form a reluctant alliance in order to escape the circles of Hell.

Yue may be the last of her kind. At night, she stalks the streets of the capital city of Longhao, luring in unsuspecting victims with the mask of a beautiful woman, then consuming them in her true form of the nine-tailed fox.

When she is captured by a powerful demon hunter named Sonam and banished to Hell, she manages one final act of dragging him—and two of his subordinates—down with her.

Now trapped in an abyss with unimaginable terrors, they’ll need each other’s help to navigate Hell and bypass the gods who preside over each circle, each of whom presents the group with a unique and deadly challenge. Forced to depend on one another as they claw their way out of the underworld, both demon and demon hunter discover that there might be more to the other than meets the eye.

My Review:

Yue is a demon. Not the horned and cloven-hoofed demon of Western mythology, but rather the nine-tailed fox of Asian legend, known as a kitsune in Japan, a kumiho (or gumiho) in Korea and, in this particular story, the Chinese húli jīng. Perhaps mixed with just a bit of the kumiho – or at least their signature nine tails.

She may be a demon, she may look like a monster – at least without her magical mask – but she’s not actually evil. She’s all alone after the deaths of her sisters, and she’s just trying to survive the best she can. She’s also an apex predator – at least in her demon form – whose primary diet is, well, us.

She’s alone and she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself so she only takes what she needs to live. And she only takes monsters in human form, the kind of people the world would be better off without. She doesn’t even play with her food – which honestly puts her a bit above her prey who can’t resist toying with their victims before moving in for the kill.

But there is a plague of demons killing and eating their mostly innocent victims all over the city of Longhao. Sonam, the princely ‘Demon-Hunter of Jian’ has promised his royal father that he will kill all the demons in the realm. Sonam hopes that his success will earn him the place at his father’s side that his mother’s lowly birth has kept out of his reach his entire life.

Sonam has never questioned what he’s been taught about demons and their rapacious monstrosity. Not until he meets Yue, both in her guise as a beautiful woman and in her true form as a burn-scarred, nine-tailed, fox. Because she’s not the monster he was taught she would be.

When he brings her before his father, magically caged and seemingly utterly trapped, it’s his brothers who act like monsters, while Yue waits for her opportunity to escape. Instead, his father’s mages open what they believe is a one-way portal to hell. But Yue is nothing if not resourceful. If she’s going to hell, she’s taking the man who captured her along for the ride.

The ride of a lifetime for them both. Because if they want to escape the trap they are now both in, they’ll have to do it together.

Escape Rating A-: It’s interesting how much better the books get when I’m in a better place to read them. Which may be another way of saying that Dorothy was right and “There’s no place like home.” Because I’ve finished three books since we got home and they were all better than most of last week. There’s a lesson there somewhere, but first, there’s a terrific, and terrifically surprising, book to start the week with.

In this Chinese myth-inspired fantasy, Hell doesn’t have a mere seven circles as it does in Dante’s Inferno. That would be too easy. Instead, it has TEN jade palaces, each presided over by its very own demon. A fallen god who represents one of the myriad ways that humans – and gods – can fall from the path of enlightenment. The kind of enlightenment that leads to a decent life in THIS life and a better position on the cycle of rebirth in their next.

So this Hell doesn’t have seven circles, it has 10 demon gods, mixed with a bit of The Fox Wife and wrapped – all nine tails – around horromantasy. Not so much because Yue is a monster, but because Sonam represents the monster in all of us. So, the story in The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox sits squarely at the crossroads between mythic retelling, epic fantasy, romantasy and horromantasy – with a touch of enemies to lovers for added depth and tragic potential.

There are so many ways to look at this story, and all of them just make it that much more fascinating. The hell that Yue and Sonam fall into does resemble Dante’s Inferno, but that’s because that’s my go-to-frame of reference. However, it’s really a mythic reinterpretation of Chinese legends of the “Ten Courts of Hell”, each of which is ruled by a judge, who are also based on figures out of legend.

At the same time, the story reads a bit like plenty of epic fantasy stories about battles between good and evil, because one of the judges in those Courts of Hell really is unquestionably evil and has perverted his duty as a judge into a test for recruitment to establish his evil empire – ON THE SURFACE.

But the story is also about the walk through dark places, the journey to get out of the underworld that recalls Orpheus and Eurydice and a whole bunch of other myths and fantasy stories – and tells a cracking adventure tale into the compelling bargain. And that’s the point where the story kicked into high gear and got this reader firmly in its grip.

What tripped this story from fantasy to romantasy, however, is the growing relationship between Yue and Sonam and the way it works out. It should have been tragic, a man falling in love with a monster he’s vowed to kill. But Yue only ‘looks’ like a monster. She isn’t actually monstrous. Instead, she’s rather like many vampires in paranormal romance, in that she doesn’t have to kill to feed AND when she does kill only kills those who deserve it. That Sonam recognizes the truth of her lack of monstrousness as well as the monster that lives within all humans, including himself, takes the romance out of horromance. It’s not like the romance in But Not Too Bold where both the reader and the protagonist know that someday the monster she loves will kill her, but instead turns it into a relationship of equals that neither of them expected at the start.

The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox ended up being both more and better than I expected. So much so, in fact, that I’ll probably pick up the author’s first fantasy, The Last Dragon of the East, the next time I’m looking for this combination of myth, adventure and romance.

A+ #BookReview: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi VoA Mouthful of Dust (The Singing Hills Cycle, #6) by Nghi Vo
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, fantasy
Series: Singing Hills Cycle #6
Pages: 112
Published by Tordotcom on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Hunger makes monsters in this dark new tale in Nghi Vo's Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle.
Wandering Cleric Chih of Singing Hills and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant come to the river town of Baolin chasing stories of a legendary famine. Amid tales of dishes served to royalty and desserts made of dust, they discover the secrets of what happens when hunger stalks the land and what the powerful will do to hide their crimes.
Trapped in the mansion of a sinister magistrate, Chih and Almost Brilliant must learn what happened in Baolin when the famine came to call, and they must do so quickly... because the things in the shadows are only growing hungrier.
The Singing Hills Cycle has been shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award, and the Ignyte Award, and has won the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award.
The novellas are standalone stories linked by the Cleric Chih, and may be read in any order.

My Review:

Cleric Chih’s Singing Hills Abbey is not precisely an archive of history. Not that it isn’t an archive, and not that it doesn’t preserve history. But it’s not a historical archive in the sense that we think of one. It’s not a place that stores original documents in an attempt to record history without bias or interpretation.

The Singing Hills Abbey, and its collection, exists at the intersection of “we make gods in our own image” and “fiction is the lie that tells the truth”.

The Singing Hills Abbey doesn’t send out its clerics to collect documents – it sends those clerics, including Cleric Chih and all those who have come before them and will come after them, to collect STORIES about history. As well as stories in general.

Their purpose is not to discover the FACTS – often those are already known. It is to discover the stories, myths and legends that people tell each other as a way of both preserving the memory of the event AND its consequences at the same time.

Because those stories commemorate the things that people want to have remembered – and hide, either by omission or in plain sight or both, the parts that are so terrible that they wish they could forget.

Cleric Chih is not supposed to become part of the stories they record. That’s not the reason the Abbey sends them out to collect those stories. In this case, the story that Chih is sent to record is the story of a devastating, THREE year long famine that occurred TWENTY years ago in Baolin.

It shouldn’t be possible for Cleric Chih to become part of THAT story. But, between the connivance of an unappeased ghost and the coercion of a guilty magistrate Chih gets caught in the middle of a truth that refuses to remain hidden a single moment longer.

All because Chih stopped along the way to Baolin and decided to do the right thing by a tiny white cat and an even tinier cache of long-forgotten human bones.

Escape Rating A+: In some ways, this is, at least so far, the hardest book in the Singing Hills Cycle. Not because of what happens to Chih, and not even because of the events that happen to Chih in the story.

But it’s a hard story because of the way it exposes the truth of Baolin, the truth of Chih’s mission and the purpose of the Singing Hills Abbey, and a whole lot of extremely uncomfortable truths about the all-too-frequent inhumanity of humans.

Because this is a story about the hard calculus of survival, as seen through the stories of an entire village that survived three years of famine because they made those calculations and did what was necessary for their own survival.

Chih has come to record their stories, but only after hopefully enough time has passed for the traumatized remnant of the town’s original population to have found ways to both relate and cope with the personal truths of what they experienced. Because what they experienced was the human condition at the depths of desperation, ‘red in tooth and claw’ – and knife and soup pot.

Chih doesn’t expect a pretty story, because there are plenty of famine stories preserved at the Abbey. And they are all different but they are also very much the same. That those who survived sacrificed everything they believed was true about themselves in order to live just one more day.

Over and over and over again. And it’s tragic, it’s terrible, and it’s ultimately extremely human.

But the story that Chih eventually discovers, the story that the magistrate has hidden for decades amid protestations of morality and atonement, tells an even more terrible story than the one they believed they had come for.

It’s a story about the way that ALL the variables change when there’s nothing left. And that the directives that held sway in normalcy turn out to be the greatest of sins at the hard sharp end of catastrophe.

In the end, this is not a comfortable read, and Cleric Chih is far from comfortable themself throughout. Chih’s uncomfortable because their situation is precarious. The magistrate is keeping the cleric in close confinement while maintaining the fiction that the cleric is a guest. And it’s uncertain to Chih what they need to do, or say, or promise – or undo, unsay or un-promise – in order to escape.

The reader is uncomfortable because the stories Chih collects are the kind that in our world used to be told only in whispers about survivors of shipwrecks and remote plane crashes or as part of proven historical incidents such as the Franklin Expedition and the infamous Donner Party. Yet from Chih’s perspective, these stories are so common that young clerics in training regularly go down to the archives to scare and/or disgust themselves by reading the worst of such stories available.

Of which there are MANY.

The stories that Cleric Chih does learn are each fascinating in the way that they explore how people and families process grief and trauma around experiences that are almost literally unthinkable. The nature of this particular assignment says a great deal about the mission of the Abbey as a whole, as well as its commitment to preserving the experiences and stories that many in power would prefer be hidden, suppressed or forgotten.

Because those are the stories that expose the truth of the human experience instead of the best of it.

But the stories of Cleric Chih’s missions for the Singing Hills Abbey, from the series’ beginning in The Empress of Salt and Fortune, are always fascinating and manage to always FEEL true, no matter how much they represent the story that someone wants to tell instead of any objective truth.

Even though I’m still thinking over the implications of THIS story, I’m already looking forward to the next. A Long and Speaking Silence is set to tell the story of one of Cleric Chih’s earliest missions. Origin stories are always fun. Sometimes dangerous, but fun to read. We’ll have to see how much danger Chih gets into, this time next year.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Pearl City by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Pearl City by Julia Vee and Ken BebellePearl 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.