Scan barcode
hidekisohma's review
2.0
So, this was my first ancient chinese fantasy book, and...i can't really say it's an amazing introduction.
This was the first book in a while that wasn't recommended to me, or i read as part of a series. This was a straight up 'picked up random off the shelf at a half price books' book. And...well it wasn't TERRIBLE?
The story is basically about a Chinese woman named Xiao Yen who is a mage who works with origami paper, basically bringing them temporarily to life. She gets sent to guard some westerners and their horses on a journey cross country for them to sell them.
The story is basically just that, her farting around the countryside for a bit with them and a chinese courtesan who turns out to be a goddess. The goddess then asks Xiao to get a hairpin from a dragon to kill an immortal dude.
She gets the pin from a dragon and then, having sidetracked her trip with the foreigners she immediately gets kidnapped and sexually assaulted. (yeah it was REALLY out of left field) she then beats the bad guy but is sad she had to kill a dude. The rest of the book (about 1/3) is just her meandering around until she gets the guy she was protecting to the town and realizes that she likes being a paper mage.
That's really all there is in this book. The only other plot relevant thing that happens in this book is that every other chapter it goes back to when she was training to be a paper mage from when she was a kid to when she graduated. it's really not that exciting. The training is about as exciting to read about as reading kids taking classes in school.
The biggest issue i had with this book is that it felt aimless. She was basically wandering around with a final goal in mind, but then there was one big sidetrack along the way. Once that was taken care of, with the final third of the book to go, it kind of just petered off where she was dancing and she had to send a dragon back to the ocean with her paper magic. it felt REALLY tacked on. it kind of felt like the author wrote that part with the evil guy, had her beat him and go "oh crap, this is only 200 pages. i need this to be longer" and threw on an additional story that really didn't mean anything.
There was also no character arc. the character left her hometown being wishy washy, and she came back being wishy washy. i thought she would like, fall in love with the foreigner, or realize that she didn't need her family or that her whole life she had been told what to do and was going to break free or something, but it was just...very meh and tepid. like she didn't want to fully commit. there was no PASSION in this book. everything felt subdued and tired.
Xiao didn't really LEARN anything throughout her journey. she trained for the about 1o years to be a paper mage and her BIG character arc at the end leads her to..... wanting to be a paper mage (slow clap) beautiful. just beautiful.
This character is as bland as a sack of old wet newspaper and her reactions can be annoying. this guy had her sexually assaulted and she pricked him with the immortality ruining pin and it kills him? better whine about having killed a guy for 80 pages even though a literal good god told you to kill this guy.
If i had to take a shot for every time she either said how unlucky she was or every time she hemmed and hawed whether to be a mage or a mother, i would honestly be dead. she retreads over the same things in her mind over and over to the point of being annoying and tiresome.
I thought there was a reason the author picked the method of back and forth chapters (going from the past to now) but i really believe this was done for the sole purpose of that the author thought it would be too boring to do it in chronological order. That's not a good sign for your book if that's the case.
At least the prose wasn't too confusing or pretentious and i could understand pretty much everything that was going on.
I wish Xiao had learned to embrace other cultures rather than just "being happy to see them go" and go back to her insulated xenophobic ways and caring WAYYYYY too much about what her family thinks (yeah yeah i know that's how it was in ancient china, but this is fantasy with dragons and magic. it's not biographical)
It was a book of meandering. At times a PRETTY meander, but a meander nonetheless.
Paper mage needed to get foreigners and horses to another country. she did so while bitching on the inside. then she went home to be a magician. the end.
That's really all you have to know.
At the start of this review i wasn't sure whether to give this a 2 or 3, as the score is truly a 2.5, but after writing this out, yeah, i'm gonna give it a 2. There's too much nothing to give it a 3. I didn't HATE it, but i'll absolutely never read it again. there's nothing TO read.
not terrible, not good, just a meandering meh.
2.5 out of 5 rounded down to a 2.
This was the first book in a while that wasn't recommended to me, or i read as part of a series. This was a straight up 'picked up random off the shelf at a half price books' book. And...well it wasn't TERRIBLE?
The story is basically about a Chinese woman named Xiao Yen who is a mage who works with origami paper, basically bringing them temporarily to life. She gets sent to guard some westerners and their horses on a journey cross country for them to sell them.
The story is basically just that, her farting around the countryside for a bit with them and a chinese courtesan who turns out to be a goddess. The goddess then asks Xiao to get a hairpin from a dragon to kill an immortal dude.
She gets the pin from a dragon and then, having sidetracked her trip with the foreigners she immediately gets kidnapped and sexually assaulted. (yeah it was REALLY out of left field) she then beats the bad guy but is sad she had to kill a dude. The rest of the book (about 1/3) is just her meandering around until she gets the guy she was protecting to the town and realizes that she likes being a paper mage.
That's really all there is in this book. The only other plot relevant thing that happens in this book is that every other chapter it goes back to when she was training to be a paper mage from when she was a kid to when she graduated. it's really not that exciting. The training is about as exciting to read about as reading kids taking classes in school.
The biggest issue i had with this book is that it felt aimless. She was basically wandering around with a final goal in mind, but then there was one big sidetrack along the way. Once that was taken care of, with the final third of the book to go, it kind of just petered off where she was dancing and she had to send a dragon back to the ocean with her paper magic. it felt REALLY tacked on. it kind of felt like the author wrote that part with the evil guy, had her beat him and go "oh crap, this is only 200 pages. i need this to be longer" and threw on an additional story that really didn't mean anything.
There was also no character arc. the character left her hometown being wishy washy, and she came back being wishy washy. i thought she would like, fall in love with the foreigner, or realize that she didn't need her family or that her whole life she had been told what to do and was going to break free or something, but it was just...very meh and tepid. like she didn't want to fully commit. there was no PASSION in this book. everything felt subdued and tired.
Xiao didn't really LEARN anything throughout her journey. she trained for the about 1o years to be a paper mage and her BIG character arc at the end leads her to..... wanting to be a paper mage (slow clap) beautiful. just beautiful.
This character is as bland as a sack of old wet newspaper and her reactions can be annoying. this guy had her sexually assaulted and she pricked him with the immortality ruining pin and it kills him? better whine about having killed a guy for 80 pages even though a literal good god told you to kill this guy.
If i had to take a shot for every time she either said how unlucky she was or every time she hemmed and hawed whether to be a mage or a mother, i would honestly be dead. she retreads over the same things in her mind over and over to the point of being annoying and tiresome.
I thought there was a reason the author picked the method of back and forth chapters (going from the past to now) but i really believe this was done for the sole purpose of that the author thought it would be too boring to do it in chronological order. That's not a good sign for your book if that's the case.
At least the prose wasn't too confusing or pretentious and i could understand pretty much everything that was going on.
I wish Xiao had learned to embrace other cultures rather than just "being happy to see them go" and go back to her insulated xenophobic ways and caring WAYYYYY too much about what her family thinks (yeah yeah i know that's how it was in ancient china, but this is fantasy with dragons and magic. it's not biographical)
It was a book of meandering. At times a PRETTY meander, but a meander nonetheless.
Paper mage needed to get foreigners and horses to another country. she did so while bitching on the inside. then she went home to be a magician. the end.
That's really all you have to know.
At the start of this review i wasn't sure whether to give this a 2 or 3, as the score is truly a 2.5, but after writing this out, yeah, i'm gonna give it a 2. There's too much nothing to give it a 3. I didn't HATE it, but i'll absolutely never read it again. there's nothing TO read.
not terrible, not good, just a meandering meh.
2.5 out of 5 rounded down to a 2.
mst3kakalina's review
4.0
People talk a lot about pacing with this book, and I can understand the complaint. It's not very swashbuckling; each chapter sort of plods along, interesting and engaging but not a page-turner.
The really incredible part about this book (and the reason I finally decided on a four-star rating instead of three) is the sheer amount of research that went into it and also the textured, gritty world that Cutter put together. This is a book you don't read for the story as much as you read to live in the world OF the story. In that sense it reminds me a lot of Garth Nix's Sabriel. The only downside is that there are places where it suffers a bit from pedantic info-dumping. But other than that, well done. Hopefully we will see some sequels or parallel stories set in this world.
The really incredible part about this book (and the reason I finally decided on a four-star rating instead of three) is the sheer amount of research that went into it and also the textured, gritty world that Cutter put together. This is a book you don't read for the story as much as you read to live in the world OF the story. In that sense it reminds me a lot of Garth Nix's Sabriel. The only downside is that there are places where it suffers a bit from pedantic info-dumping. But other than that, well done. Hopefully we will see some sequels or parallel stories set in this world.
wealhtheow's review against another edition
3.0
Xiao Yen is a rarity--a female who can harness paper magic. After years of relentless training, she hires out to protect a travelling caravan. Within days, she is enlisted in the fight against an evil, immortal warlord. After defeating a dragon and the warlord, she races back to her home city to warn them of the warlord's unleashed army. Xiao Yen has a very precise personality that the author carefully constructs in the present day and in flashbacks to her training. The world is a well-developed. The tempo of the book felt very off to me, however. I'm not sure if it's a more Eastern style, or if it was just a misstep on the author's part. First, the constant interchanges between past and present cut the tension considerably: just when I was getting into the present-day story, it would switch to her past, and it's clear that Xiao Yen succeeds in her training, so the flashbacks have little suspense. Also, the ending felt both rushed and pieced together. After defeating the warlord, Xiao Yen escorts the foreign caravan to their port, has an odd interlude in which she wakes a dragon and is charged as a witch, and only *then* races back home--where I'm not sure why her warning was needed in the first place.
eternalflame22's review against another edition
1.0
DNF
I'm disappointed. This book had such a great start and premise, an interesting take on magic and good characters and history.
And then it turns into just another fantasy novel, in a sea of such novels, in which a woman protagonist gets graphically raped.
I'm disappointed. This book had such a great start and premise, an interesting take on magic and good characters and history.
And then it turns into just another fantasy novel, in a sea of such novels, in which a woman protagonist gets graphically raped.
xterminal's review
2.0
Leah Cutter, Paper Mage (Roc, 2003)
The whole time I was reading this book, which I did on and off (far more off than on) for almost four months, I kept feeling vaguely guilty that I didn't like it a great deal more than I actually did. I think this is because I can't quite put a finger on why it is I found the book to drag so terribly. It's not the pacing, the characters, the plot, or anything else I can pick out; there's just something.
The book concerns a young woman named Xiao Yen, a newly-graduated paper mage. (While it is never explicitly stated in the novel, there is some intimation that she is the first woman to ever become a professional paper mage.) In alternating chapters, we get the story of her first commission (guarding a pair of foreigners and their shipment of horses from her home city, Bao Fang, to the coast) and, in flashback, the story of how she became a paper mage in the first place.
Part of my problem once I got halfway through the book was structural; the flashback story stays on its course, while the tale of the trail (forgive me, I couldn't resist) takes a sudden, sharp turn into a completely new plot. That does not, however, answer the question of what bothered me about the first hundred fifty pages. The book is deliberately paced, but it's consistent in that, so it wasn't the problem. Cutter's characters are at least interesting, if often flirting with the kinds of stereotypes one sees in “woman breaking new ground into traditional male field” novels; when they stay away from the stereotypes, they're solid and well-drawn. It's not a badly-written novel by any means. There's just something about it that didn't quite gel for me. Your mileage may-- and probably will-- vary. **
The whole time I was reading this book, which I did on and off (far more off than on) for almost four months, I kept feeling vaguely guilty that I didn't like it a great deal more than I actually did. I think this is because I can't quite put a finger on why it is I found the book to drag so terribly. It's not the pacing, the characters, the plot, or anything else I can pick out; there's just something.
The book concerns a young woman named Xiao Yen, a newly-graduated paper mage. (While it is never explicitly stated in the novel, there is some intimation that she is the first woman to ever become a professional paper mage.) In alternating chapters, we get the story of her first commission (guarding a pair of foreigners and their shipment of horses from her home city, Bao Fang, to the coast) and, in flashback, the story of how she became a paper mage in the first place.
Part of my problem once I got halfway through the book was structural; the flashback story stays on its course, while the tale of the trail (forgive me, I couldn't resist) takes a sudden, sharp turn into a completely new plot. That does not, however, answer the question of what bothered me about the first hundred fifty pages. The book is deliberately paced, but it's consistent in that, so it wasn't the problem. Cutter's characters are at least interesting, if often flirting with the kinds of stereotypes one sees in “woman breaking new ground into traditional male field” novels; when they stay away from the stereotypes, they're solid and well-drawn. It's not a badly-written novel by any means. There's just something about it that didn't quite gel for me. Your mileage may-- and probably will-- vary. **
jen1110's review
3.0
Interesting concept and world, but not as much character development as I prefer. Still, it was a good book to read in the car on a long drive.
More...