It's steampunk. It's Japanese. It's fantasy. And HOLY WORLD-BUILDING, BATMAN.
Everything just felt so richly imagined. The setting, the costumes, but also the culture itself, with its Guildsmen and samurai and clans and irezumi and everything in between. The world in this book is called the Shima Empire. It's ruled by the shogun, Yoritomo, who is protected by his ranks of Iron Samurai. Also close to the shogun are the many Guildsmen of the Lotus Guild - a group who's basically monopolized every industry in Shima, putting them to use for the production of everything lotus - lotus fuel, lotus-based drugs, probably even lotus shampoo. They're also the driving religious force in the nation, promoting the worship of the gods and the burning of any citizen deemed "impure". Then of course there are the clans, and the irezumi worn by each clan, and even more complexities within the clans, and even more complexities after that... It's pretty complex.
This world is so rich and imaginative, I can't even... You have your cities, like Kigen, that are so polluted and disgusting and corrupt, and then you have the Iishi Mountains, which are so pure and utterly devoid of human corruption. The contrast between them is so stark, and so beautifully done - Kigen makes Iishi seem all the purer and Iishi makes Kigen seem like the worst place to live on the planet (which it probably is).
The book spends about half its time in Kigen, and the other half in the Iishi, which is fantastic because I felt like I got to completely immerse myself in both settings without becoming bored. And the detail is flawless. The scenes are so rich, all the little details adding together to create such a complex and interesting image. Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book:
"Yukiko and Akihito made their way through the squeezeways, over the refuse-choked gutters, past the grasping hands of a dozen blacklung beggars and down into Docktown; a cramped and weeping growth of low-rent tenements and rusting warehouses slumped in the shadows of the sky-ships. A broad wooden boardwalk stretched out over the black waters of the bay, hundreds of people shoving and weaving their way across the bleached timbers... Lotusmen swarmed in the air about them like brass corpseflies, the pipes coiled on their backs spitting out bright plumes of blue-white flame."
Time and time again I found myself getting swept up in scenes like that, so completely and utterly imagined that I couldn't believe it was just a figment of some guy's imagination.
And the costumes. Those outfits - I mean, really, people wearing giant brass suits to filter out the poisonous air (with the added side-effect of being basically invincible), chainsaw katanas, and steam-powered armor all alongside traditional Japanese robes and gowns - I'd want to see this book as a movie just for those costumes.
I did, however, have a few issues with this book.
First of all, the clans. I love the idea, and I think it added so much to this world that Kristoff has created. I would have loved to know more about them, though. It's hinted at several times throughout the book that there used to be more clans than the ones currently existing, but it's never mentioned what happened to them. The only kind-of, sort-of history of the Shima Empire we're ever given in this book are a few myths and legends that don't really add much to the story, and I wish there'd been more cold-hard facts.
The biggest issue, however, was with the characters. I loved Yukiko, and I loved Buruu even more, but everyone else was a bit... eh. There's a love triangle, but neither of the two men vying for Yukiko's attention ever really got my attention. They were both a bit predictable and boring, and in fact were remarkably similar.
I think that was the problem with the majority of the supporting characters in this book. They were all a bit too unremarkable, one-dimensional, and... similar. I mean, A+ for branching out from the overly-populated "white guy/white girl" section of YA novels, but you can't stop there, which this author seems to have done, if only a bit. Even Yukiko got on my nerves toward the end, with her cliched struggle of right vs. wrong that was reminiscent of Katniss in Mockingjay, only with much less style and much more predictability.
The only redeeming character in the novel is one I'm shocked I haven't even mentioned yet - Buruu, the thunder tiger. I won't say too much because spoilers, but he is bad-ass. I loved him. He was perfect.
Overall, I gave this book a three out of five stars on Goodreads, and I am planning on reading the sequel because I think Jay Kristoff will probably (hopefully) have improved a lot on some of his weaker elements (like the characters). We'll see.
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