Jade City

Hovering between a 3.5 and a 4* for me, this book explored some really fresh new grounds sorely lacking in popular fantasy novels these days. It called back to the Hong Kong gangster movies and dramas that I grew up watching, blending it with elements of wuxia, martial arts, and superhuman abilities.

This book follows the Kaul family, legendary heads of the No Peak clan, in a world where jade is a heavily coveted gemstone, not so much because it's worth money but because they imbue superhuman senses, strength and abilities to those who come into contact with it. The ability to harness these abilities from jade has been naturally specific to the genetics of the Kekonese people, but now, there emerges a new drug that's said to be able to increase this “jade sensitivity” in the non-Kekonese.



This book went from a 4* at the start because of this refreshing new premise that I've never seen replicated in any fantasy book before, but then wavered down to an almost-DNF around the 25% mark, before it picked up to 3* and up after I got past the 50% mark, which was when things really got exciting.

The reason why the book went down to an almost-DNF was probably because of mismatched expectations. I had gone into this expecting the magic and fantasy elements to be very much in the foreground, but this was very much not the case. It was the clan values, the gang politics and intrigues, and the politics between different sets of people that pretty much took center stage here. The magical properties of jade served mainly as a backdrop for all of the above to happen. Most of the time, jade felt more like a magical-realism manifestation of something abstract in real life, like dignity or brotherhood or loyalty. The book centers around jade, but it's really barely a magical system in itself. The realisation of this was what almost made me drop the book.

A quick side note to jade: I really enjoyed that it was so unpredictable. Touching jade typically gives people some kind of euphoric rush of power, but different people in the story have different levels of jade sensitivity, with some being far more susceptible to the addictive properties of this rush, while others are completely dead to it. I like that jade was dangerous as well as powerful. It was a raw, natural element in itself, and entirely out of the control of the people who wielded it. You could just as much die of jade oversensitivity or jade withdrawal, as it makes it easier for you to kill others with the powers it gives you. In effect, it behaved a lot more like a stimulant drug than a magical gemstone.


None of the characters are really 100% likeable in the story, which I'm not mad at. The main characters aren't bad people in themselves, but a lot of them make bad decisions, or react poorly to certain situations. I like that. I find more and more that I'm not into overly likeable main characters, and the fact that these main characters have actual blemishes on their figurative resumes makes me appreciate the characterisation all the more.

Once I got past my mismatched expectations, though, and once I started getting sucked in to the real meat of the book, which is all the family dynamics and gang politics, I started enjoying myself much more. This is especially so after the halfway mark of the book - even though I was devastated that Lan died, because I had thought him the best of the siblings and a cinnamon roll in his own right, his death did really kickstart the action and that was when the book actually started getting gripping for me - I had bemoaned how long the book was in the first quarter of it, but I binged it so hard after the halfway mark that I finished the entire book in less than 24 hours!