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Stormdancer
by Jay Kristoff
In a steampunk land based on feudal Japan where the blood lotus powers it machines and pollutes its skies, a mad shogun commands his chief hunter to find him a griffin, despite the fact that the creatures have vanished. But the hunter and his daughter Yukiko find one, only for their airship to go down in flames, leaving Yukiko stranded in the wilderness with a crippled griffin. The world building in Stormdancer is fabulous--Kristoff has thought out every aspect of this world and fills each page with rich detail. But he never sacrifices emotional impact for elaborate mythology and the characters in this book are just as vividly drawn as those in any "literary" novel. Yukiko is a clever and resilient heroine that I found myself cheering for on every page of the book, and the other characters are just as complex (even the villains are legitimately terrifying). It's Buuru, the griffin himself, who ultimately emerges as one of the characters and it's fascinating to see how he grows and changes throughout the novel. It does drag a little in the first 100 pages, as Kristoff fills every scene with more detail and less plot, but the twists and turns of the next 200 more than make up for it. Recommended for fantasy nerds ready for a challenge.