Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon

[meganbmoore]

I’ve heard that when Cindy Pon first submitted this book to a publisher, she was told that Asian fantasy didn’t sell. Thankfully, another publisher realized that there was an audience out there for wuxia books focusing on a heroine’s coming of age.

Admittedly, I’m not sure just how big that audience is. Hopefully big enough to secure at least a second book. I should also note that I spent the entire book very distracted by Ai Ling’s remarkable resemblance to Liu Yi Fei on the cover.

Ai Ling is the only child of a former government official. When her father disappears on a trip and a local merchant attempts to trick her mother into making Ai Ling his fourth wife due to a fake debt, Ai Ling runs away to try to find her father. Along the way she meets Chen Yong, the half-foreign (apparently European) son of one of the Emperor’s concubines (this is revealed in the prologue) who is searching for the truth of his origins, and they start travelling together.

A friend has described the early stages of the book as such:

I'm about 65 pages in and thus far, Ai Ling has encountered three-breasted women who suck the life of men through sex, been dragged into a lake filled with skulls by a serpentine thing that tried scare her into turning back, inadvertently called wasps down upon a drunkard who accosted her in an alleyway, slept in a shed filled with pigs & chickens (I love how unglamorous Ai Ling's journey is), and at the moment seems to be inadvertently sending an aspiring rapist flying into walls and ceilings without the benefit of hands--

And it’s true! And that was only the beginning! By the end we also have reincarnation, magic pendants, secret identities, immortals, a goddess, a dragon, ancient curses, talking fountains that spew acid, and plenty of other things I’ve already forgotten about! I think Pon may have been trying to get as much Chinese mythology and fantasy into 341 pages as was humanly possible.

Which could get overwhelming, save that the journey itself is as unglamorous and unmagical as possible. People get grimy and dirty. Nonstop travel makes Ai Ling so tired that she sleeps for two days. Cozy inns and comfy caves aren’t conveniently distributed throughout the countryside. At one point, there’s four people and one horse to go around. In one of the more memorable passages, Ai Ling meets a woman who looks as perfectly put together as wuxia heroines on journeys tend to, and contemplates how, unlike the woman, she’s sweaty and redfaced and travelling has made her own hair come out of its braid and form a frizzy halo around her head. (I sympathize with the braid problem on every possible level.) And really, the book is full of amazing descriptions, both mundane and fantastic.

While I think the very end was a little forced, I very much enjoyed the book, and hope Pon writes more.