Rebel Dawn by Ann Sei Lin
Apr. 13th, 2025 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Nothing can be gained without sacrifice …
Desperate to free the shikigami, Kurara journeys deep into the mountains of Mikoshima - through villages devastated by a roaming swarm of shadowy monsters, and a country at war across land and sky. If Kurara cannot find a way to make the Star Seed bloom, the suffering she has caused will be for nothing.
But there is more to lose than she knows.
It’s a week after REBEL FIRE.
Having destroyed the phoenix shikigami, Suzaku, and taken the Star Seed from her core, Kurara and Haru are travelling to the mountain village where she and Haru used to live, accompanied by Himura and the snake shikigami Mana. Kurara hopes that there may be something there that can tell her how to make the Star Seed bloom into a tree, which she can then use to preserve the sanity of the shikigami without forcing them to bond with Crafter masters. But she is haunted by what she learned from Suzuku about her role in the betrayal of the shikigami and her guilt is magnified by the knowledge that by killing Suzaku she has unleashed the yuurei, the souls of dead Crafters that are now roaming the land, killing anyone they come into contact with and immune from any form of weapon.
Meanwhile Tomoe and Sayo are making their way back to their friends on the Orihime but their journey is a perilous one. Tomoe’s father, Kazeno Rei, has formed an alliance with Prince Ugetsu who plans to usurp his father, the Emperor but Tomoe knows that her father will have plans of his own and is hungry for his Sorabito to seek revenge against all ground dwellers.
As the Empire tears itself apart and the yuurei spread further across the cities, Kurara, Haru, Himuru and Tomoe will be forced to confront who they really are and risk unbearable loss …
The conclusion to Ann Sei Lin’s YA fantasy trilogy delves deeper into the mythology of her Japanese-inspired world and focuses on themes of grief, loss and guilt. However there’s too much plot here for the length of the book, which means that some storylines unfurl in too perfunctory a way and don’t have the room they need to give the emotional punch Lin wants readers to experience, which is a real shame in the case of one specific character death.
I picked this up because I was impressed - albeit with some reservations - with the preceding books in this trilogy, REBEL SKIES and REBEL FIRE. Lin has created a genuinely fascinating fantasy world that combines Japanese culture and history with the art of origami to explore ideas of freedom and control.
This book is very much consumed by the emotion of guilt as Kurara struggles to come to terms in her own role in the enslavement of the shikigami and how her desire to find a way to make the Star Seed bloom is really a desire for redemption. Similarly Himura is trying to come to terms with his own guilt at his abuse of the shikigami and the way he has sold out both Kurara and Haru in his own pursuit of power and validation.
For me, Himura’s journey with his grief is more interesting than Kurara’s because he does experience growth as he realises how badly he treated his fox shikigami Akane and how his repeated offers to Mana to bond with her to save her sanity is as much for his own benefit as it is for hers, even as he becomes increasingly uncomfortable at his bond with Haru. In contrast Kurara’s emotional journey is one-note because she never actually reconciles with what she’s done and when she does seek to make some act of atonement, Lin has the plot intervene to stop her from doing so, thus increasing her sense of guilt. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but at the same time it does - after a while - become very samey.
Adding to the problem is that Lin has a lot of plot here:
- Kurara’s quest to make the Star Seed bloom;
- the civil war between Prince Uegu and Kazeno Rei;
- the need to come up with a way to deal with the yuurei; and
- Sayo and Tomoe’s journey back to the Orihime.
That is a lot to pack in and resolve in 346 pages and it is perhaps inevitable that Lin cannot do full justice to each one. One of my persistent comments about this trilogy is that it’s that rare example of a YA series that could easily be longer than it is because it needs more room to breathe and I really wish that this had perhaps been a quartet to explore everything in more depth.
In this case, I don’t think that the Sayo and Tomoe storyline added anything to the book. Sayo in particular is very badly served in this book - nothing more than a plot point in Tomoe’s journey, which is a real shame because she started off as being really interesting in REBEL SKIES and yet never really gets a chance to do anything. Similarly Tomoe’s relationship with her father - despite having the potential to be really interesting - doesn’t have the page devoted to it enough to give it any emotional heft. I never felt that I really knew much about either of them and although Rei has potential to be a genuinely interesting antagonist given how he’s as much of a self-aggrandising, narcissistic psychopath as Prince Ugetsu or Princess Tsukami.
The story unfurls at a breakneck pace, especially in the final quarter. This means that when the deaths start to occur they lack the effect that they should have - particularly one death, which really should have been more of a heart-stopping moment than it is. Matters are not helped by the fact that the antagonists in the book are very thinly drawn, which means there is less sense of menace than there should be.
On the plus side, there is a lot of thought that’s gone into the world building here and I still love the way that Lin shows the magical qualities of the Crafters and the things they can do with paper. I also enjoyed the fact that although the book ends with a firm resolution for the main characters, the epilogue shows that things are not all instantly perfect in Mikoshima and there is still potential for future strife. I very much hope that Lin will take an approach similar to what Philip Reeve has taken with his MORTAL ENGINES world and write some further books in the same universe, perhaps with new characters to further explore it.
Notwithstanding that the ending to this trilogy did not land in a way that fully worked for me, I would very much like to read what Lin writes next because I think that she is going to be a significant voice in children’s and YA fantasy fiction.
The Verdict:
The conclusion to Ann Sei Lin’s YA fantasy trilogy delves deeper into the mythology of her Japanese-inspired world and focuses on themes of grief, loss and guilt. However there’s too much plot here for the length of the book, which means that some storylines unfurl in too perfunctory a way and don’t have the room they need to give the emotional punch Lin wants readers to experience, which is a real shame in the case of one specific character death.
REBEL DAWN was released in the United Kingdom on 7th November 2024. Thanks to Walker Books for the review copy of this book.
Desperate to free the shikigami, Kurara journeys deep into the mountains of Mikoshima - through villages devastated by a roaming swarm of shadowy monsters, and a country at war across land and sky. If Kurara cannot find a way to make the Star Seed bloom, the suffering she has caused will be for nothing.
But there is more to lose than she knows.
It’s a week after REBEL FIRE.
Having destroyed the phoenix shikigami, Suzaku, and taken the Star Seed from her core, Kurara and Haru are travelling to the mountain village where she and Haru used to live, accompanied by Himura and the snake shikigami Mana. Kurara hopes that there may be something there that can tell her how to make the Star Seed bloom into a tree, which she can then use to preserve the sanity of the shikigami without forcing them to bond with Crafter masters. But she is haunted by what she learned from Suzuku about her role in the betrayal of the shikigami and her guilt is magnified by the knowledge that by killing Suzaku she has unleashed the yuurei, the souls of dead Crafters that are now roaming the land, killing anyone they come into contact with and immune from any form of weapon.
Meanwhile Tomoe and Sayo are making their way back to their friends on the Orihime but their journey is a perilous one. Tomoe’s father, Kazeno Rei, has formed an alliance with Prince Ugetsu who plans to usurp his father, the Emperor but Tomoe knows that her father will have plans of his own and is hungry for his Sorabito to seek revenge against all ground dwellers.
As the Empire tears itself apart and the yuurei spread further across the cities, Kurara, Haru, Himuru and Tomoe will be forced to confront who they really are and risk unbearable loss …
The conclusion to Ann Sei Lin’s YA fantasy trilogy delves deeper into the mythology of her Japanese-inspired world and focuses on themes of grief, loss and guilt. However there’s too much plot here for the length of the book, which means that some storylines unfurl in too perfunctory a way and don’t have the room they need to give the emotional punch Lin wants readers to experience, which is a real shame in the case of one specific character death.
I picked this up because I was impressed - albeit with some reservations - with the preceding books in this trilogy, REBEL SKIES and REBEL FIRE. Lin has created a genuinely fascinating fantasy world that combines Japanese culture and history with the art of origami to explore ideas of freedom and control.
This book is very much consumed by the emotion of guilt as Kurara struggles to come to terms in her own role in the enslavement of the shikigami and how her desire to find a way to make the Star Seed bloom is really a desire for redemption. Similarly Himura is trying to come to terms with his own guilt at his abuse of the shikigami and the way he has sold out both Kurara and Haru in his own pursuit of power and validation.
For me, Himura’s journey with his grief is more interesting than Kurara’s because he does experience growth as he realises how badly he treated his fox shikigami Akane and how his repeated offers to Mana to bond with her to save her sanity is as much for his own benefit as it is for hers, even as he becomes increasingly uncomfortable at his bond with Haru. In contrast Kurara’s emotional journey is one-note because she never actually reconciles with what she’s done and when she does seek to make some act of atonement, Lin has the plot intervene to stop her from doing so, thus increasing her sense of guilt. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but at the same time it does - after a while - become very samey.
Adding to the problem is that Lin has a lot of plot here:
- Kurara’s quest to make the Star Seed bloom;
- the civil war between Prince Uegu and Kazeno Rei;
- the need to come up with a way to deal with the yuurei; and
- Sayo and Tomoe’s journey back to the Orihime.
That is a lot to pack in and resolve in 346 pages and it is perhaps inevitable that Lin cannot do full justice to each one. One of my persistent comments about this trilogy is that it’s that rare example of a YA series that could easily be longer than it is because it needs more room to breathe and I really wish that this had perhaps been a quartet to explore everything in more depth.
In this case, I don’t think that the Sayo and Tomoe storyline added anything to the book. Sayo in particular is very badly served in this book - nothing more than a plot point in Tomoe’s journey, which is a real shame because she started off as being really interesting in REBEL SKIES and yet never really gets a chance to do anything. Similarly Tomoe’s relationship with her father - despite having the potential to be really interesting - doesn’t have the page devoted to it enough to give it any emotional heft. I never felt that I really knew much about either of them and although Rei has potential to be a genuinely interesting antagonist given how he’s as much of a self-aggrandising, narcissistic psychopath as Prince Ugetsu or Princess Tsukami.
The story unfurls at a breakneck pace, especially in the final quarter. This means that when the deaths start to occur they lack the effect that they should have - particularly one death, which really should have been more of a heart-stopping moment than it is. Matters are not helped by the fact that the antagonists in the book are very thinly drawn, which means there is less sense of menace than there should be.
On the plus side, there is a lot of thought that’s gone into the world building here and I still love the way that Lin shows the magical qualities of the Crafters and the things they can do with paper. I also enjoyed the fact that although the book ends with a firm resolution for the main characters, the epilogue shows that things are not all instantly perfect in Mikoshima and there is still potential for future strife. I very much hope that Lin will take an approach similar to what Philip Reeve has taken with his MORTAL ENGINES world and write some further books in the same universe, perhaps with new characters to further explore it.
Notwithstanding that the ending to this trilogy did not land in a way that fully worked for me, I would very much like to read what Lin writes next because I think that she is going to be a significant voice in children’s and YA fantasy fiction.
The Verdict:
The conclusion to Ann Sei Lin’s YA fantasy trilogy delves deeper into the mythology of her Japanese-inspired world and focuses on themes of grief, loss and guilt. However there’s too much plot here for the length of the book, which means that some storylines unfurl in too perfunctory a way and don’t have the room they need to give the emotional punch Lin wants readers to experience, which is a real shame in the case of one specific character death.
REBEL DAWN was released in the United Kingdom on 7th November 2024. Thanks to Walker Books for the review copy of this book.
