I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I fuck so heavy with this series… what an absolutely masterful weaving together of stories. This review contains spoilers so be warned!
I appreciate so much about this whole series but in particular I want to highlight that Fonda Lee is an absolute craft master of echoes—Chekov’s gun, the way she plants things that pay off 200 pages later, and also how she creates these little moments that mirror each other in different ways across the story. In particular, the way she has Hilo learn how to use his jade abilities to deflect a car bomb and then like half the book later, just when we’ve forgotten about him learning how to do that, he gets blown up by a bomb and ends up protecting himself from it?! She had me a nervous wreck waiting to find out if Hilo would still be alive and I didn’t even remember that he probably had the skills to handle an attack in that way!
I also love and absolutely hate the way she will mercilessly kill a beloved character on-page for… really what seems like almost no reason. As furious as I was at Ru’s death, and despite having said that it seems like no reason, the fact is that it is for a reason and I know what that reason is: to really drive home how easy and how fast it is for someone to be killed in this jade world she’s created.
Fonda Lee has created a completely gorgeous world in this series and I’m devastated that there’s not more to read, but I guess that just means I’m going to have to go right back and start over again with Jade City, huh? I will be thinking about this series for a long time.
(ALSO WHEN DO I GET MY TV SERIES PLS I BEG!)