A Palace Near the Wind
Ai Jiang
Hardcover/eBook
ISBN: 9781803369389
Titan Books, April 15, 2025, 192 pgs

Liu Lufeng belongs to the Wind Walkers, a small, tree-like race of people who live in the forests, live on sunlight and air, and can control the wind to varying degrees. The more human-like Land Wanderers are slowly uprooting the Wind Walker’s trees and building over their forests in the name of progress, led by a cruel and mysterious King. They’re slowed—not stopped—by a series of bridal trades. The daughters and granddaughters of the Wind Walker Elder have all married the king, one by one, and never came back. Lufeng’s mother and sisters have already gone; now it’s her turn to enter the Palace and face her fate.

Something about the way this novella is built and described reminds me a little bit of the Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal. It’s imaginative, unique, eerie, a little fey, a (very) little biopunk, with some climate themes sprinkled on top. Lufeng’s world feels magical and completely alien. Fantasy fiction naturally runs on the notion that it takes place in an imaginary world, but usually, there are a few reality-based touchpoints to go off. That’s not the case here. Nearly everything in A Palace In The Wind feels freshly sewn out of whole cloth. Many of the things in this book are fantastic; the way that characters look, the geography of the kingdom, and the way that food and houses and other mundane things work. The same things also manage to be strange and sometimes a little unsettling. Fortunately, the natural world–and its slow destruction–play quite a big part in the story, and that’s familiar enough to keep readers grounded. You’ll still have to pay close attention while you read to get a good sense of the places and people.

Speaking of the people, Lufeng may be the most perfectly naive fantasy heroine I’ve ever encountered on a page, but in a way, it works. She isn’t dumb, but she has no idea what’s really going on and no sense of how high the stakes are until things get pretty dire. Any other hero or heroine would be much angrier and more sceptical nearly every step of the way, but Lufeng just seems sweet, well-intentioned, and very out of her element. Just when her lack of savvy starts to get irritating, there’s a weird and wild twist right in the center of the book that works precisely because Lufeng is so naive. It’s also a pathway for some more science-fantasy elements to be introduced, and again, worldbuilding is what really makes all of this shine. Visualizing this weird world and its workings as the story unfolds is an imaginative treat.

A Palace In the Wind is the first in the Natural Engines duology, which means two things: this book is mostly set up, and it ends on a giant cliffhanger. It’ll be interesting to see where all the politics and foreshadowing take us in the next book. I’m looking forward to seeing new parts of this world and some of the characters that are only hinted at here.