Daniel Fox: Hidden Cities
Dec. 7th, 2010 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustNew readers start here: Daniel Fox, who is now unmasked as Chaz Brenchley (who is ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance) is the author of Moshui, The Books of Stone and Water, a magnificent trilogy set in a medieval China where there really are dragons, and where the Emperor really does have powers that ordinary people don't.
I wrote here about the first volume, Dragon in Chains, and encouraged everyone to read it. I seem not to have posted about the second volume, Jade Man's Skin: perhaps I gulped it down too greedily to feel capable of saying anything coherent about it. The middle book of a trilogy can feel slow, as if a certain amount of territory has to be crossed before the intriguing opening can segue into the exciting finale: but Jade Man's Skin isn't one of those. It's full of events which are real and important (there's a battle, full of confusion and bloodshed and consequences) and change the lives of the central characters, and which enlarge the reader's view of which characters are central; and it introduces new characters, one of whom involves reconsidering what you've been told about how the world works (and realising, with one of those shifts of understanding which were such a joy in Dragon in Chains, that yes, this is actually exactly what you'd been told all along).
Which is why I was so impatient to read the final volume, Hidden Cities, and find out what happened next: To Mei Feng and to the Emperor, to Han and Tien and the dragon, to Old Yen and his boat, and - it's a long list, even before you start wondering about the mysterious jade tiger which appeared just long enough to leave everyone wondering, was that real? will we see it again?
This isn't a post about why you should rush out and buy this book. For one thing, you can't: it won't be published until the spring (though you can order it already); for another, either you've already read the first two books and can't wait to read Hidden Cities or you haven't, in which case, this is not the place to start (although if you start now with Dragon in Chains, you'll be ready by the time Hidden Cities is published). This is a post about how lucky I am that the author is a friend of mine, and has allowed me to read his wonderful, astonishing book in advance of publication.
And I'm sitting here typing sentences and then erasing them, over and over again, because Hidden Cities is so full of good things, and I don't want to spoil the surprise. And there are any number of surprises in this book: things that I wasn't expecting to happen, characters I wasn't expecting to do what they do, characters whose viewpoint I wasn't expecing to share - and one one-line action that took my breath away, it's so surprising and so inevitable that I could only laugh at the rightness of it. By the end of the book, the whole huge sprawling epic has been gathered up to a conclusion which is entirely satisfying. It doesn't promise a Happy Ever After, but it does bring the characters to places from which they can continue with their lives in new and unexpected ways.
desperance) is the author of Moshui, The Books of Stone and Water, a magnificent trilogy set in a medieval China where there really are dragons, and where the Emperor really does have powers that ordinary people don't.I wrote here about the first volume, Dragon in Chains, and encouraged everyone to read it. I seem not to have posted about the second volume, Jade Man's Skin: perhaps I gulped it down too greedily to feel capable of saying anything coherent about it. The middle book of a trilogy can feel slow, as if a certain amount of territory has to be crossed before the intriguing opening can segue into the exciting finale: but Jade Man's Skin isn't one of those. It's full of events which are real and important (there's a battle, full of confusion and bloodshed and consequences) and change the lives of the central characters, and which enlarge the reader's view of which characters are central; and it introduces new characters, one of whom involves reconsidering what you've been told about how the world works (and realising, with one of those shifts of understanding which were such a joy in Dragon in Chains, that yes, this is actually exactly what you'd been told all along).
Which is why I was so impatient to read the final volume, Hidden Cities, and find out what happened next: To Mei Feng and to the Emperor, to Han and Tien and the dragon, to Old Yen and his boat, and - it's a long list, even before you start wondering about the mysterious jade tiger which appeared just long enough to leave everyone wondering, was that real? will we see it again?
This isn't a post about why you should rush out and buy this book. For one thing, you can't: it won't be published until the spring (though you can order it already); for another, either you've already read the first two books and can't wait to read Hidden Cities or you haven't, in which case, this is not the place to start (although if you start now with Dragon in Chains, you'll be ready by the time Hidden Cities is published). This is a post about how lucky I am that the author is a friend of mine, and has allowed me to read his wonderful, astonishing book in advance of publication.
And I'm sitting here typing sentences and then erasing them, over and over again, because Hidden Cities is so full of good things, and I don't want to spoil the surprise. And there are any number of surprises in this book: things that I wasn't expecting to happen, characters I wasn't expecting to do what they do, characters whose viewpoint I wasn't expecing to share - and one one-line action that took my breath away, it's so surprising and so inevitable that I could only laugh at the rightness of it. By the end of the book, the whole huge sprawling epic has been gathered up to a conclusion which is entirely satisfying. It doesn't promise a Happy Ever After, but it does bring the characters to places from which they can continue with their lives in new and unexpected ways.
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