A review by blue_guitar
The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang

emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I read this as part of the 2024 r/fantasy Bingo – Self published or indy  

Sword of Kaigen by ML Wang was a book I was really looking forward to, especially given the high regards that I’d seen for it in the last few years. 

After reading it, I can say there’s a lot of greatness to it. 

I really liked the world, the magic, the potential for a grand epic story and the action scenes were incredibly well written.  

But there’s also some pretty significant elements that disappointed me. The book revolves around the two central characters, Misaki and her son, Mamoru, dealing with a domineering and abusive husband and father, and some sort of government conspiracy (that unfortunately is never really explained) and the ramifications of past and future wars. It’s a character driven plot, with most of the ‘action’ of the book happening internally to the two POV characters. 

However, the pacing just seems off. Multiple points throughout reading the book, I was asking myself – when is something interesting going to happen? So much of Kaigen is just slice of life description. There’s a lot of conversations that don't advance the plot or show anything new about the characters, they just have small talk. Alternatively, you get page after page of exposition, lots of telling and not showing. 

Which brings me to the next issue that came up, you’d assume that this was a novel set in a period like the Edo Shogunate in Japan. It’s not, you soon realize that this world has satellites and jet fighters and computers. 

I’m not sure this was the right call for the book. It creates a strange dissonance between the magic and world building – especially when the characters seem to exist in this pseudo medieval lifestyle. The characters bounce between very traditional mentalities to near modern conversations. It kept pulling me out of the story when it happened. At one point, character says "touché” after being presented with a good point.  

Towards the end of the book, I was getting a little frustrated by a few repeating motifs, many scenes of someone telling someone to go and hide, but they refuse, very "I won't leave you" type scenes. In fight scenes, Misaki keeps having her age and limits brought up as negative factors, this never happens for the male fighters. There’s also this uncomfortable theme of purity of bloodlines being equated with more powerful individuals. There’s a race of people who are described as “white” with “impure bloodlines” who are physically weaker and lack magical powers. Those beliefs are never really challenged by any of the characters.  

Finally, I found the ending is really clumsy. There is a new plot point introduced, apparently for a sequel that was canceled, but it really makes it more long-winded than it needed to be. The central conflict between the main characters gets wrapped in a way that I’m not sure the story earned, particularly giving a very cruel character a happy ending. 

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