Review: Ebony Gate by Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle

Review: Ebony Gate by Julia Vee and Ken BebelleEbony Gate (Phoenix Hoard, #1) by Julia Vee, Ken Bebelle
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, urban fantasy
Series: Phoenix Hoard #1
Pages: 448
Length: 14 hours and 7 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Tor Books on July 11, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Julia Vee and Ken Bebelle's Ebony Gate is a female John Wick story with dragon magic set in contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Emiko Soong belongs to one of the eight premier magical families of the world. But Emiko never needed any magic. Because she is the Blade of the Soong Clan. Or was. Until she’s drenched in blood in the middle of a market in China, surrounded by bodies and the scent of blood and human waste as a lethal perfume.
The Butcher of Beijing now lives a quiet life in San Francisco, importing antiques. But when a shinigami, a god of death itself, calls in a family blood debt, Emiko must recover the Ebony Gate that holds back the hungry ghosts of the Yomi underworld. Or forfeit her soul as the anchor.
What's a retired assassin to do but save the City by the Bay from an army of the dead?

My Review:

When we first drop into Emiko Soong’s life, she has been living in San Francisco for two years trying to seem normal – leaving behind as much as possible that made her hated and reviled as the Blade of Soong, the Butcher of Beijing.

But assassins don’t get to retire, and members of high-ranking Hoard Custodian families don’t get to leave their clans or their pasts behind – no matter how much they might want to. Or need to.

Emiko’s San Francisco both is and is not the one we Waīrén – read as garden-variety, no-magical-talent, original recipe-type humans see. Because Emiko is a member of one of the clans descended from the Eight Sons of the Dragon, and she has talents that seem magical. Or at least the other members of her family and the rest of the clans do. Emiko is a dud, a disappointment to her parents and her clan.

Or so she believes. (I left the book wondering a whole lot about the truth of that, but that’s me wondering and nothing revealed – at least not in this first book in the trilogy. We’ll see.)

If you haven’t guessed, Ebony Gate is urban fantasy, in a setting that’s a bit like The Nameless Restaurant where the magic and magic-users are hidden in plain sight from the mundanes, but in a world where the danger is dialed up to the max due to both political skullduggery and outright violence.

(There are also touches (or more) of Nice Dragons Finish Last, The City We Became and Jade City if you get the same book hangover from Ebony Gate that I did and are looking for readalikes. I digress.)

Emiko is a woman caught between worlds, and destinies. Without power of her own, she’s been a pawn of everyone around her, from her parents to her clan to the rest of her people, the Jiārén to the primal forces at the heart of both her world and her adopted city.

At her heart she’s a protector – but she’s been molded into a killer through guilt and manipulation. San Francisco was her chance to start over, but her mother’s machinations have just pulled her back into the middle of everything she tried to set aside.

She can’t avoid the duty – because her powerful mother has put her in a position where taking up that obligation is the only way she can keep her beloved brother safe. So Emiko is back where she started, wading through blood and guts and hoping that her martial arts skills will be enough to beat back people with the power to create whirlwinds and tornadoes.

What awaits her if she fails is a fate that is, really, truly, worse than death. If she succeeds on the terms that everyone expects of ‘The Butcher of Beijing’ she might as well resign herself to an early death as her family’s vengeance blade.

But there’s a slim possibility that she can forge a path of her own – if she’s able to let go of enough of her own damage to accept a job that may still get her killed – but on her own terms and in a truly righteous cause.

Escape Rating A+: Hot damn but this was good. It had me hooked from the opening and I stayed engrossed until I turned the last page and kind of screamed because I wasn’t ready for it to be over. And it’s not as this is the first book of a trilogy but I want that second book NOW! Dammit.

Ebony Gate is one of those stories where I started in audio, and absolutely loved it, but switched to text because as much as I didn’t want this to end I was getting desperate to learn how this first book in the trilogy concluded.

That being said, I want to give a big shoutout to the narrator, Natalie Naudus, who also narrated Max Gladstone’s Last Exit. She was a terrific choice to narrate both books, as both are written in the first-person perspective of characters with the same attitude of take no shit, take no prisoners, get shit done no matter the cost to oneself and always, always keep one’s angst and insecurities and weaknesses on the inside where no one can take advantage of the weaknesses – but no one can help carry the burden, either.

While the urban fantasy thriller pace of Ebony Gate relentlessly keeps the reader turning pages, this is a story that leans hard on the personality of its protagonist – as do pretty much all of the characters she deals with along the way.

Everyone wants a piece of her. Everyone always has. She’s second and third guessing herself at every turn, as she always has and always does, because she’s never felt like she’s enough for any of the tasks laid before her. She plows on anyway. Always.

But through her memories of her failures and her internal monologue of her thoughts, fears and frustrations, we’re able to experience her world through the eyes of someone who is an insider but who has always seen herself as being on the outside looking in. And whose fatal flaw isn’t, after all, her lack of power, but rather her inability to get her opponents to STFU. This is Emiko’s journey and we’re absolutely taking it with her and it’s fan-damn-tastic AND nail-biting every step of the way.

Before I stop the squee – and yes, I fully recognize I’m just squeeing all over the place at this point because I loved this one SO DAMN HARD – I have one more thing to add.

Ebony Gate is the first thing that has scratched even a tiny bit of the book hangover itch from Fonda Lee’s marvelous Green Bone Saga. Not that other books haven’t given me itches nearly as bad – I’m looking at you, Glass Immortals – but this is the first thing that has assuaged even the tiniest bit of that particular itch – even as it creates one of its very own. Which means I’m looking forward, rather desperately, to the next book in this series, Blood Jade, coming hopefully sometime next year

Review: Last Exit by Max Gladstone

Review: Last Exit by Max GladstoneLast Exit by Max Gladstone
Narrator: Natalie Naudus
Format: audiobook
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, horror, urban fantasy
Pages: 400
Length: 21 hours and 3 minutes
Published by Tor Books on March 8, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Ten years ago, Zelda led a band of merry adventurers whose knacks let them travel to alternate realities and battle the black rot that threatened to unmake each world. Zelda was the warrior; Ish could locate people anywhere; Ramon always knew what path to take; Sarah could turn catastrophe aside. Keeping them all connected: Sal, Zelda’s lover and the group's heart.
Until their final, failed mission, when Sal was lost. When they all fell apart.
Ten years on, Ish, Ramon, and Sarah are happy and successful. Zelda is alone, always traveling, destroying rot throughout the US.
When it boils through the crack in the Liberty Bell, the rot gives Zelda proof that Sal is alive, trapped somewhere in the alts.
Zelda’s getting the band back together—plus Sal’s young cousin June, who has a knack none of them have ever seen before.
As relationships rekindle, the friends begin to believe they can find Sal and heal all the worlds. It’s not going to be easy, but they’ve faced worse before.
But things have changed, out there in the alts. And in everyone's hearts.
Fresh from winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Max Gladstone weaves elements of American myth--the muscle car, the open road, the white-hatted cowboy--into a deeply emotional tale where his characters must find their own truths if they are to survive.

My Review:

There was a serpent gnawing at the roots of the world. Zelda, June, Sarah, Ramon and Ish go on the road trying to do something to slow it down or keep it at bay or just stop it. If they can. Because they believe they must. Because they tried before – and they failed.

But, and it’s a very big but that fills the sky with thunder and lightning and cracks the ground all around them every place they go – is that “last exit” they’re searching for the last exit to get OFF the road that is heading TO hell, or is it the last exit to get ON that road. Differences may be crucial – and nearly impossible to judge when the critical moment arrives with the ring of boot heels on cracked and broken pavement.

Ten years ago, five college students (Sal, Zelda, Sarah, Ramon and Ish) who all felt like outsiders at their preppy, pretentious Ivy League school (cough Yale cough) discovered that they each had a ‘knack’ for exploring the multiverse. So, they decided to go on an adventure instead of heading out into the real world of adulting, jobs and families.

They wanted to make the world better – or find a world that was better – rather than settle for and in the world they had. So they went on ‘The Road’ and explored all the alternate worlds they could find within the reach of their “souped up” car.

They found adventure all right. And they were all young enough to shrug off the danger they encountered and the damage they took escaping it. But what they did not find was anyplace better. They didn’t even find anywhere that was all that good.

They helped where they could and escaped where they had to and generally had a good time together. But, and again it’s a very big but, all the worlds they found had given way to the same terrible applications of power and privilege and use and abuse that are dragging this world down. They found death cults and dictatorships and slavery and madness everywhere they went.

The multiverse was rotting from within, because there was a serpent gnawing at the roots of the world.

So together they embarked upon a desperate journey to the Crossroads at the heart of all the multiverses, the place where there might be a chance to not just shore up the forces of not-too-bad in one alternate world, but in all the alternate worlds all at the same time.

They failed. And they lost the woman who was their heart and their soul. Sal fell through the cracks of the world. She was lost to the rot that was destroying not just the alts but their own world as well.

That could have been the end of their story. And it almost was. Without Sal, they fell apart. Individually and collectively. Sarah went to medical school and raised a family. Ish raised a tech empire. Ramon tried to destroy himself, tried to forget, and ended up back where he started.

And Zelda stayed on the road, sleepwalking through ten years of loneliness, doing her best to plug the holes in this world where the rot was creeping in.

Because it was all their fault – it was all her fault. She lost Sal, the woman she loved – and then everything fell apart. She feels duty-bound, obligated and guilt-ridden, to fix it.

It takes ten years, and a kick in the pants from Sal’s cousin June, for Zelda to finally acknowledge that the only way she can fix what she broke, what they broke, is going to require more than a little help from their friends.

If they’re willing to take one final ride on the road.

American Gods by Neil GaimanEscape Rating A-: In the end, Last Exit is awesome. But it takes one hell of a long and painful journey to reach that end. Because it starts with all of them not just apart, but in their own separate ways, falling apart. And it ends with all of their demons coming home to roost – and nearly destroying them – as they relive the past and do their damndest to push through to either some kind of future – or some kind of sacrifice to balance out the one they already made when they lost Sal.

The reader – along with Zelda and Sal’s cousin June – starts out the story believing that it’s all about the journey. Or that it’s a quest to reach a specific destination that may or may not be Mount Doom. It’s only at the very, very bitter end that they – and the reader – figure out that it was about the perspective all along.

A lot of readers are going to see a resemblance to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, but I haven’t read that so it wasn’t there for me. What I saw was a sharp comparison to American Gods by Neil Gaiman – both because it’s very much an “American Road Story”, even if most of the Americas are alts, but especially because of that sudden, sharp, shock at the end, where the reader has to re-think everything that came before.

I listened to Last Exit all the way through, and the narrator did a terrific job of differentiating the voices. There was a lyricism to the characters’ internal dialogs that she conveyed particularly well – it was easy to get caught up in each one’s internal thoughts and understand where they were coming from, even if the sheer overwhelming amount of angst most of them were going through was occasionally overwhelming – both for the characters and for the listener.

Part of what makes this a densely packed and difficult story and journey is that the main character and perspective is Zelda – who is just a hot mess of angst and guilt and regret. We understand why she blames herself for everything – whether anything is her fault or not – but there seems to be no comfort for her anywhere and you do spend a lot of the book wondering if she’s going to sacrifice herself because she just can’t bear it a minute longer.

The story feels a bit disjointed at points because the narrative is disjointed both because Zelda keeps telling and experiencing snippets of what happened before interwoven with what’s happening now and because the alts themselves are disjointed. It’s clear there’s some kind of organizing geography, but I just didn’t quite see it. To me, the alts all sounded like various aspects of the fractured future Earth in Horizon: Zero Dawn and I stopped worrying about what went where.

There were a lot of points where I seriously wondered where this was all going. Where it ended up wasn’t what I was initially expecting – at all. But it was one hell of a journey and I’m really glad I went, even if I needed a cocoa and a lie-down to recover from the sheer, chaotic wildness of the ride..