Jade City (The Green Bone Saga Book 1) Kindle Edition

Jade City is a work of modern, urban fantasy. For those who have not read it, think of it as a cross between Avatar: The Last Airbender anime series, with the novels The Godfather, and Dune. It has gang family strife with mixed martial arts, and magic! They have cars, TV, and regular telephony, but no internet or mobile devices. From our Earth technology perspective I feel like the story would take place sometime in the late 1970s through early 1990s. A world pre-internet and pre-mobile devices.Fantasy tropes evident in Jade City:Good versus Evil: We have two main gang families battling for supremacy. On the side of the protagonists we have the Kaul family. The antagonists are the Ayt family.Epic Battles: both gang families fight for control of magical jade and for control of their turf in Janloon the capital city of their small island nation of Kekon (which is roughly the size of Taiwan).Magic: It comes from magical jade stone, which only comes from Kekon island where the gang families fight for control. With training and appropriate genes, you can manipulate jade energy and learn powers from the following six disciplines (Lee p. 62): Strength, Steel, Perception, Lightness, Deflection and Channeling.Sword and Sorcery: As you would expect in martial arts, there are many hand-held weapons mentioned, along with lots of combat. This hand-to-hand combat is enhanced with jade stone. More jade gives you more power, assuming you have the training (and genes) to properly handle it.Star Wars fans will recognize the jade warriors as members of the Jedi or Sith factions, based on their strict hierarchy, training regimen, and reverence of jade energy which roughly translates to "the force" in Star Wars parlance.Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fans will easily recognize the jade warriors as members of the Monk D&D character class due to their martial prowess and the intense mental and physical training regimen.Tensions are built and explode after the Kaul family discovers the Ayt family is embezzling magical jade from the national mines, selling it overseas, and profiting immensely from the smuggling operation. The assassination of the leader of the Kaul mafia family also starts a series of irreversible actions leading to open urban clan warfare.World building considerations:Geopolitics and nation-state metaphors: geopolitics is mentioned by way of what's happening outside the island nation of Kekon, between two larger continental powers that covet Kekon nation's magical jade stone: Espenia (which roughly equates to the US and/or the West), and Ygutan (which roughly equates to China). China is playing catch up with the West, technologically speaking. Jade City parallels this reality: "Tensions between Espenia and Ygutan grows day by day. The world is dividing into camps, and both sides covet the jade found only on this island. What kind of fortune did the Espenians spend to ... equip their elite soldiers with jade? The Ygutanians are playing catch-up, but they certainly want no less" (Lee p. 407).Resources and resource metaphors: The magical jade stone in Jade City plays a role similar to "spice" in Frank Herbert's Dune. Both jade stone and spice are unique to the local environments (no one else can produce them). In Dune, spice is a metaphor for petroleum. In Jade City, magical jade stone is a metaphor for semiconductors, which our modern world needs for everything from toys to appliances to nuclear command and control systems.Economics: The island nation of Kekon, where magical jade originates, is analogous to modern Taiwan (where today's most advanced semiconductors originate). Our world economy needs semiconductors to operate. The US doesn't want Taiwan to fall under control of China because that would inhibit the supply of advanced semiconductors to the US and the West. Jade City's people of Kekon island are aware of their version of geoeconomic reality regarding the nation states of Espenia and Ygutan respectively: "We're a small country with a precious resource. If we don't take the right actions, we'll find ourselves at the mercy of imperial powers again" (Lee p. 407).Jade City vs. The Godfather vs. Dune: In each book power corrupts, crime families exist, and powerful families strive against each other. Yet in some ways Jade City transcends Puzo's The Godfather precisely because of the aforementioned geopolitical elements and the economics of Lee's magical jade stone. In The Godfather, such an all powerful, unique resource, magical jade stone, doesn't exist nor is controlled by Don Corleone or the other mafia families. As for geopolitical elements, while they exist in The Godfather (between the US, Italy and Germany for example, and the mentioning several times of WWII), there isn't as much emphasis on the larger geopolitical milieu and nation state strife in The Godfather that we get in Jade City. Regarding critical resources that the world economy and military-industrial complex run on, Jade City is more akin to Herbert's Dune, than Puzo's The Godfather, because of the wider political, military and economic roles filled by Lee's magical jade stone and Herbert's "spice" respectively.In short, Jade City has a lot going for it. The fantasy world is rich with economic and political metaphors that model modern Earth. I had to read this book as part of an MFA Creative Writing course. I am happy I chose Jade City. It wasn't boring. It was a fun read that did NOT feel like forced reading homework. The author's imagined world was amazing, and I learned a lot about world building from it.Cheers! Works CitedAvatar: The Last Airbender. Written by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, Nickelodeon, 2005.Herbert, Frank. Dune. Chilton Books, 1965.Lee, Fonda. Jade City. Orbit (Hachette Book Group), 2017.Puzo, Mario. The Godfather: the 50th Anniversary Edition. Berkley, 2002.

Fonda Lee is the much-loved author of a number of fantastic novels, and it's no wonder that her SFF epic Jade City caught the eye of the Nebula award committee. Jade City is eye-catching indeed, with an exciting premise, a fresh new type of magic, gangsters, politics, family, betrayal, and ... mining? The back cover promises more than enough to have this book flying off the shelves - and boy does it deliver!Literally by page 3 I was already blown away by Lee's world building. You can read more about her take on world building in SFF in this interview over on the Barnes and Noble SFF blog, and you should - because she is a master. There were a couple of places where I found I was asking questions about "how things worked," only to find that she answered them 10-20 pages later. The world she's created for Jade City is wonderful, inspiring, and I'm truly glad it looks like we're all going to get at least two more books in which to explore it.No review of this book could get far without talking about the magic in this book, so that's where I'll start. Lee introduces readers to a modern world in which some people (natives of the fictitious island of Kekon) can access magical superhuman powers by wearing, or being very near, the gemstone jade. Of course, there's a whole culture around how, and by whom, jade is worn, and Lee uses this to great effect both overtly (in describing how characters feel about their jade and that of others) and subtly (as she teaches us as readers the meaning of jade early on, she empowers us to draw our own interpretations and conclusions later on in the narrative). The loving way she mentions jade - how it catches the light, how it swings on a chain, how it sits in the handle of a blade or the setting of a bracelet, how it glows against the skin - feels casual, beautiful, and insidious. In a word: magical.One of the more masterful things Lee has done in Jade City is marry old-world (fictitious) cultural tradition with modern globalism, politics, and business, in a way that feels absolutely real, relatable, and truly fascinating. This marriage isn't seamless, and Lee uses that friction to add depth to the world, to motivate her characters, and to help readers invest in the narrative on multiple levels at once. Yet somehow, though she uses Taiwanese, Japanese, and other east Asian imagery and cultural tropes (traditional and modern) as touchstones in her fictional nation of Kekon, they don't feel like tropes.When I picture the traditional architecture's sloping roofs I feel like I'm borrowing from my exposure to Japanese architecture to inform my understanding of Kekonese tradition. Similarly, when Lee describes her leather-clad street gangs' wild hairstyles, the fact that I'm picturing a Bosozoku pompadour feels coincidental - rather than as though she's borrowing too heavily from current cultures.Jade City's greatest strength, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with all those wild and wonderful promises from its back cover (though have I stressed yet just how well Lee delivers on all those promises?). It's all about the main characters. They're all so epically, unbelievably, human. The main characters, Lan, Hilo, and Shae, are each in their own right some of the most fully realized and deeply individual characters I've ever encountered in speculative fiction. For the three of them to make up an ensemble cast is almost overwhelming. Their flaws don't feel like plot devices, their mistakes aren't convenient, and though they're all incredibly strong jade-wearers none of them feel like any kind of god-mode Gary Stu. And the way she illustrates so many rarely-explored facets of masculinity ... a whole article could be written on her characters' masculinity alone. She does what so many authors fail to do - writes fully-rounded characters who each own their own kinds of masculinity. I can honestly say I've never encountered another cast of characters like this, and I'm moved by it.This isn't to say that I have no bones to pick with this book. On the contrary, while I clearly think Lee has done a fantastic job in creating Jade City, I'm not an overly large fan of her writing. In general, her narrative voice is simpler than I prefer - offering many short, choppy sentences rather than indulging in more complex phrases. Where this stood out most to me was the way in which it hampered what could have been a much more poetic descriptive style. There were a few times where her poeticism came through for me, but for the most part it fell flat because of her narrative voice.Another quibble is one I've already alluded to. While she did get around to answering all my questions about the world and its workings, I was distracted again and again, was pulled out of the story because I was missing vital information about the background or setting. While this is normally not something I'd mention about a book, it ended up having a significant impact on my enjoyment of this book in particular. Especially in the first 100 pages or so, her use of undefined terms or references to unknown groups and affiliations became dense enough that whole paragraphs read like buzzword-salad. Stick with it, though, because the payoff is completely worth it.In the end, I'm very impressed by Fonda Lee's Jade City and am prepared to recommend it to just about everybody - and I'll happily wait until 2019 for my next visit to Kekon.

A história é realmente maravilhosa, te prende demais. Infelizmente a edição não e mto legal. As páginas são finas e ruins, vai pra frágil.

Este libro no tiene nada que ver con la fantasía convencional. La narrativa es hermosa y los personajes son INCREIBLES. Lo amo lo amo lo amo.

Série mt boa

The book arrived in great condition. Also, I really loved this book, it was just incredible. The multiple nominees and awards this book has won are completely justified.

Light, breathtaking, a book you don't want to put down.Attaching Mafiosa family try to maintain the peace in their town, somewhere in China. With a touch of science fiction/fantasy.Hat's off Fonda Lee.