Of Jade and Dragons
Amber Chen
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780593622759
Viking Books for Young Readers, June 2024, 480 pages

Greetings readers, and welcome to another book review! This month we’re going to embark on a twisting adventure filled with wild devices, rebellions against the natural order of things, and the battle between creation and destruction in Amber Chen’s Of Jade and Dragons.

The novel follows the story of Aihui Ying, a girl from a backwater island in the Nine Isles. She dreams of being a master engineer like her father, but she’s stuck with one problem—the Engineer’s Guild doesn’t accept women, and her family isn’t interested in letting her leave. However, after her father’s brutal murder at the hands of an unknown assassin, and Ying’s discovery of his hidden notebook, she has no choice but to try and enter the Engineer’s Guild anyway to track down whoever sent her father’s killer. Things escalate from there (there may or may not be a mecha-dragon involved at some point) until Ying is caught in a power struggle between the highest levels of leadership among the Nine Isles.

While the temptation is there to see this book as a cross of Mulan and (kind of) Harry Potter, it’s actually so much more than that, and a big part of that is Chen’s adept subversion of expected tropes. Aihui Ying has to keep her identity hidden as she attempts the Engineer’s Guild entrance exam, but where one would normally expect a series of clever misdirections or plot-armor protagonist avoidances, Ying quickly learns that she’ll have to rely on others to keep her secret just as she keeps theirs. This subversion continues with the romance elements of the story, which start in an expected direction and then end up someplace completely different that still feels like a totally natural progression of the characters.

Speaking of the characters, Of Jade and Dragons is as much a tale of the surrounding cast as it is Ying’s. Chen does a fantastic job interweaving the lives of various engineering students, government functionaries, and political leaders together in a way that creates a rich, vibrant world. We experience this world through Ying’s perspective, but it’s clear that her viewpoint is only a facet of all the other forces at play. There are plots interwoven within plots, opposing goals and desires, and the culmination of all of them felt incredibly satisfying to witness.

As great as the character development is, Chen does just as good a job building the world for those characters to inhabit. Drawing heavily from founding elements of the Qing Dynasty, Chen captures the political upheaval and instability of a new empire forming, but interjects her own unique flavor of what can only be described as steampunk and silkpunk combined. Airships share space with spear-armed levies, clockwork bees roam shifting forests, and mercurial metals combine in explosive ways. The environment of Of Jade and Dragons always left me impressed, both at its richness as well as its cleverness.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out Chen’s brilliant approach to the science of engineering without getting bogged down in the weeds of minutiae. Of Jade and Dragons is a recognition of the horrible dichotomy engineers face with their creations as well as their desire to create—at what point does that shift from benefitting people to harming them? When does today’s mining powder become tomorrow’s bombs?

Overall, this is a book that I found easy to lose time reading, captivating in its imagination, and one with an important message that transcends time. If the choice is between creation and destruction, what do we end up leaning towards? Of Jade and Dragons isn’t afraid of its answer, and I encourage you all to take a chance on it.