Ai Jiang
Titan Books
8 April 2025
192
eBook - PDF
Fantasy
ARC via NetGalley
Sometimes called Wind Walkers for their ability to command the wind, unlike their human rulers, the Feng people have bark faces, carved limbs, arms of braided branches, and hair of needle threads. Bound by duty and tradition, Liu Lufeng, the eldest princess of the Feng royalty, is the next bride to the human king. The negotiation of bridewealth is the only way to stop the expansion of the humans so that the Feng can keep their lands, people, and culture intact. As the eldest, Lufeng should be the next in line to lead the people of Feng, and in the past, that made her sisters disposable. Thankful that her youngest sister, Chuiliu, is too young for a sacrificial marriage, she steps in with plans to kill the king to finally stop the marriages.
But when she starts to uncover the truth about her peoples' origins and realizes Chuiliu will never be safe from the humans, she must learn to let go of duty and tradition, choose her allies carefully, and risk the unknown in order to free her family and shape her own fate.
A powerfully imaginative, compelling story of a young woman seeking to save her family and her home, as well as a devastating meditation on the destruction of the natural world for the sake of an industrial future.
A Palace Near the Wind had a fascinating premise, which is what drew me to read it. Unfortunately, it didn't quite deliver. Firstly, the 'message' of the book was too overpowering and it felt like it was being forced upon me on every page. Not that the message itself was bad; it's simply that it was too overt and something more subtle would have worked better. The world building was extensive, but in the space of a small novella it felt unbalanced with character development, which was, in turn, severely lacking. The main cast never felt like more than cardboard cut-outs to me, and even the plot got lost in the long sections of description and message pushing, especially when more and more plot content suddenly came in a big rush towards the end. I struggled to decide on a rating for this, but in the end I am giving it three stars. It had a lot of flaws, but the main story idea was interesting, and with a greater number of pages and further development of the characters and the plot, it could have been good, and I wanted to acknowledge that in my rating.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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