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fishface 's review for:
Stormdancer
by Jay Kristoff
Eh not the worst thing I’ve ever read (at the moment wizard’s first rule wins that award), but pretty flawed.
As other comments mention, Kristoff seems to have gone more for the flavour of Japanese steampunk than decent historically inspired fantasy world building. Many aspects were just not explained or didn’t make sense, including the political system of the empire. It appeared to be a feudal system, which works with incorporating samurai and having peasant workers beholden to their lords. But then there were also unions explicitly mentioned? If the workers (which would include peasant farmers) are able to unionise under the laws of the country why haven’t they? And why is the Guild permitted such power by the emperor whose rule is absolute? Maybe these questions are answered later in the series, but at the moment it just seems to be bad world building.
(Also why are they using human blood as fertiliser? Just for the aesthetic? If the lotus needed food the sheer amount of human shit the capital city is producing would probably suffice. That plot point really needed more to back it up because at the moment it just makes no sense)
Additionally, the period of Japan it was emulating seemed quite unclear. There were samurai and salarymen walking around at the same time... to me at least the corporate wage-slave would exist under modern capitalism with large powerful businesses (which don’t appear to exist in stormdancer) and consumer culture, whereas the samurai wouldn’t. Again more trying to flavour a poorly thought out fantasy setting without coherent word building. I had this issue with his later work Nevernight, where aspects of Roman society (gladiator arenas, two consuls) were mingled with more modern/ medieval Italian stuff (Venetian masquerade) in an annoying way as if they were the exact same cultural thing, and in Stormdancer this distortion is even more pronounced.
The author just decided to splash in as many Japanese words and concepts as he could, often in the wrong context/ usage, as opposed to building his own inspired and coherent Japanese inspired world. It was just annoying. Either make your own or do your research, but Stormdancer just didn’t.
Another problem for me lies in the main character of Yukiko. She’s 16 and thinks constantly about boys and sex even when her life is in danger. Why? It isn’t necessary to the plot, nor really to her character. She seems silly and shallow because of it, which isn’t a good look for your badass female protagonist. I’m not saying that women don’t think about and enjoy sex/romance, but come on. She meets some guy for all of three seconds and then moons over him for the rest of the book as if she has nothing better to think about.
The two decent characters were probably Kin and Buruu. Kin because although he was basically a lonely nerd whose mad Yukiko liked someone else, he actually got over it instead of getting his revenge like I expected. And Buruu because i like stories where people befriend mythical creatures (even if he is a bland version of).
Plotwise, it’s fine. It fits into the ya teen girl starts a rebellion thing, but I appreciate that Yukiko wasn’t particularly interested in how it turned out and cared more for her family and friends.
It had a lot of potential to be enjoyable, but bad world building and flat characters sucked all the fun out of it.
As other comments mention, Kristoff seems to have gone more for the flavour of Japanese steampunk than decent historically inspired fantasy world building. Many aspects were just not explained or didn’t make sense, including the political system of the empire. It appeared to be a feudal system, which works with incorporating samurai and having peasant workers beholden to their lords. But then there were also unions explicitly mentioned? If the workers (which would include peasant farmers) are able to unionise under the laws of the country why haven’t they? And why is the Guild permitted such power by the emperor whose rule is absolute? Maybe these questions are answered later in the series, but at the moment it just seems to be bad world building.
(Also why are they using human blood as fertiliser? Just for the aesthetic? If the lotus needed food the sheer amount of human shit the capital city is producing would probably suffice. That plot point really needed more to back it up because at the moment it just makes no sense)
Additionally, the period of Japan it was emulating seemed quite unclear. There were samurai and salarymen walking around at the same time... to me at least the corporate wage-slave would exist under modern capitalism with large powerful businesses (which don’t appear to exist in stormdancer) and consumer culture, whereas the samurai wouldn’t. Again more trying to flavour a poorly thought out fantasy setting without coherent word building. I had this issue with his later work Nevernight, where aspects of Roman society (gladiator arenas, two consuls) were mingled with more modern/ medieval Italian stuff (Venetian masquerade) in an annoying way as if they were the exact same cultural thing, and in Stormdancer this distortion is even more pronounced.
The author just decided to splash in as many Japanese words and concepts as he could, often in the wrong context/ usage, as opposed to building his own inspired and coherent Japanese inspired world. It was just annoying. Either make your own or do your research, but Stormdancer just didn’t.
Another problem for me lies in the main character of Yukiko. She’s 16 and thinks constantly about boys and sex even when her life is in danger. Why? It isn’t necessary to the plot, nor really to her character. She seems silly and shallow because of it, which isn’t a good look for your badass female protagonist. I’m not saying that women don’t think about and enjoy sex/romance, but come on. She meets some guy for all of three seconds and then moons over him for the rest of the book as if she has nothing better to think about.
The two decent characters were probably Kin and Buruu. Kin because although he was basically a lonely nerd whose mad Yukiko liked someone else, he actually got over it instead of getting his revenge like I expected. And Buruu because i like stories where people befriend mythical creatures (even if he is a bland version of).
Plotwise, it’s fine. It fits into the ya teen girl starts a rebellion thing, but I appreciate that Yukiko wasn’t particularly interested in how it turned out and cared more for her family and friends.
It had a lot of potential to be enjoyable, but bad world building and flat characters sucked all the fun out of it.