Song of Silver, Flame Like Night
The Song of the Last Kingdom series, Book 1
Amélie Wen Zhao
HarperVoyager
Fiction, YA Fantasy
Themes: Creative Power, Demons, Diversity, Epics, Ghosts, Girl Power, Magic Workers
**+
Description
Twelve cycles ago, Lan watched in horror as foreign invaders, the Elantians, struck down her mother in cold blood with their metal-fueled
magic. With her dying breaths, the woman left a strange sigil on her young daughter's arm, a mark only she could see: a character in no Hin
language she has ever seen, enclosed in a circle. Since then, mere survival in a conquered land has taken most of her time and energy, but
she still struggles to understand her mother's last gift, a message she's sure must hold some special meaning. But it's not until the night
she meets the strange young man at the teahouse where she works (if "work" is the proper term for what's essentially slavery) that she begins
to figure out the truth: that the mark is tied to ancient tales of powerful practitioners who once flourished in the land, and that, by
bestowing it, Lan's mother left her with both a great gift and a terrible burden.
Zen arrived in the city to meet a contact for the underground resistance against the pale invaders, only to find the old man dead... and find
traces of a very unusual power lingering in the air. He tracks it to a teahouse, and to a young woman who seems to have no idea who or what
she truly is: a potentially powerful practitioner, capable of channeling natural qi energy into magic. But right on the heels of this
discovery comes the arrival of the most dangerous foreign magician in the land, the ice-eyed Alloy of unimaginable strength and cruelty. The
man seems strangely intent on hunting down Lan, but Lan has no idea why - except for the fact that she knows him as the one who tore her
mother's heart from her chest. By rescuing Lan from the Alloy, Zen risks the secrets of the resistance and the hidden school where he learned
his practitioner skills... and also risks exposing his most shameful secrets, ones that could destroy everything.
Review
At the outset, this had all the earmarks of a solid story: a plucky young woman, a magical secret, a conquered empire steeped in history
and lore inspired by China, a mysterious stranger with more mysterious powers... and, yes, there was a cool dragon on the cover, so sue me, I
like dragons and was in the mood for a dragon story. Much like that dragon on the cover, though, those earmarks became misleading
disappointments. The fact that there is no dragon for the majority of the tale is the least of these.
Things start promisingly, with the history of the empire and the four "demon gods" - vastly powerful beings of pure yin energy, which can
work great miracles and victories but always at a great price, often involving the corruption of whoever thinks to wield them - and the
coming of the pale-skinned foreign invaders and their metal-based magic that puts an effective end to that long history almost overnight. Lan
is rebellious at heart, but as an essential slave of a city teahouse (for the foreigners may stamp down on the local culture with iron boots,
but they love the aesthetics and trappings, like clipping the wings of a captured exotic bird for display in the parlor), her opportunities
to strike back at the people who killed her mother twelve cycles/years ago are limited, especially when she can't make out her mother's
cryptic final message in the mark left on her wrist. That was twelve cycles ago that her mother was murdered before her eyes, and still Lan
doesn't understand why. Did I mention it happened twelve cycles ago? See, it had been a sentence since I said it, so you probably needed a
reminder... If you're getting tired of the repetition here, try getting that kind of repetition in a book-length story, for almost every
single plot and character point, start to finish. I had to wonder if the story was originally serialized, that the author thought the readers
needed the constant reminders to catch them back up on the story so far. As it was, it stopped being helpful very early on, and by the
halfway mark I was almost literally rolling my eyes and grinding my teeth every time the story looped back to remind me, yet again, that
Lan's mother was murdered twelve cycles ago, and how, and by whom.
Between the bouts of repetition, there's a decent amount of action, but at some point I found it hard to care about Lan or Zen... or nearly
anyone else. None of them ever become more than paper-thin caricatures fulfilling very obvious plot roles, more often than not tripping
themselves up with angst (and getting lost in their own recollections - cue yet another repetition of information the reader already knew).
The Elantians are even shallower, despite the potentially interesting magic system that defies all local understanding of how power is
supposed to work (something that no Hin practitioner, apparently, is even trying to learn or dissect, even if that might seem like the kind
of thing that a rebellion group would probably want very much to understand about their enemy; instead, they're more caught up in policing
their own handful of surviving practitioner disciples by old rules handed down by admittedly paranoid rulers who had already decimated qi
lore long before invaders showed up to finish the job), and the Alloy who murdered Lan's mother (remember, Lan's mother, who was murdered
twelve cycles ago?) struts and monologues and preens and sneers and only lacks the Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl and a railroad track
to which to tie helpless damsels (though maybe that turns up in the sequel). So... what, the Hin people have a rich, diverse, sometimes
contentious history stretching back thousands of cycles, while the Elantians just fell out of the sky as a monolithic entity with no
emotion or motivation beyond basest greed and cultural superiority? Why even hint at their alchemy and their metal magic and their
angel-heavy symbolism without following through on any of it? They're not even really people, just things, stomping and shouting and
stealing and destroying, things whose only apparent weakness is not knowing about qi. (And, yeah, I get that white people haven't exactly
trod with delicate steps around the world, but part of what makes a conquering culture dangerous isn't just the stomping and shouting and
stealing; it's how their cultures have taught them to rationalize their own terrible and destructive actions, how they work to spread that
culture to those they've conquered until the victims start parroting the same ideas. This book offers some aesthetic trappings of foreign
culture, but no real sense of that culture itself, or how it's poisoning its latest acquisition. There's a lot more about how previous
turnovers in Hin power have poisoned Hin histories and folklore than how the Elantians have done the same.) In any event, stuff happens,
characters angst and waver and make sacrifices and mistakes, Zen's hair keeps falling over his eyes like a cut-rate anime character, and
it finally ends by promising a sequel.
I wanted a dragon story. I got a pair of angsty clichés who wouldn't stop telling me things I already knew ad nauseam, in a world
that felt shortchanged by them and their story. Despite some solid ideas and interesting descriptions and a few decent action sequences, I
don't think I'll bother with the next installment, even if the dragon might actually be in that one.