Road to Ruin
Hana Lee
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781668035610
Saga Press, May 2024, 368 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re packing our magebike’s saddlebags, dodging angry pteropters, and hitting the postapocalyptic Road to Ruin, a thrilling adventure by Hana Lee.

Road to Ruin begins with Jin-Lu, one of the couriers who braves the wasteland between domes to carry goods and messages from city to city, and who is having a no good, very bad day. She’s spent the last three years running love letters between a prince trapped in one city and a princess trapped in another, but the fairy-tale pen pal romance quickly turns into a vicious struggle for survival as Jin-Lu is forced to confront not just her past, but her feelings for the pair of distanced lovers who she connects, as well as the hastening decline of civilization itself. Mysteries unfold, high speed chases ensue, and three people find themselves drawn together in the most unexpected ways.

Set in a battered desert wasteland filled with isolated cities, strange mutants, and bloodthirsty raiders, and featuring a tough-as-nails courier protagonist, Road to Ruin draws some very obvious inspiration from films like Mad Max, but author Hana Lee quickly makes the reader aware that an homage is not the same thing as a copycat. While there are parts that readers will find familiar, Lee does an amazing job of not letting anything feel derivative or tropey, instead crafting a fantastic environment that is clearly not Earth and stands completely on its own. The world of Road to Ruin is lush without being overbearing, and serves as a stunning backdrop for the most important part of the story.

I’m speaking, of course, of the characters.

It is rare to find a book that nails complex personal dynamics between multiple people in the way Lee has, and all I can say is that it’s spectacular. Every character has a depth that seems to leap off the page, and in particular, the relationship between Jin-Lu and the two royals she moves between is equal parts beautiful, frustrating, heartfelt, bittersweet, and full of a longing that coils through it all (it reminded me a lot of This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone). The characters constantly surprised me with their choices, though they always made sense, and the ending left me both impressed and instantly wanting more.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t touch on Road to Ruin’s underlying themes of the abuses of power and price of freedom. Both are heavy subjects, but Lee touches on them with delicacy and aplomb and like any good dystopian tale, moral quandaries abound. It’s also clear that even though Lee has crafted a world entirely her own, the dilemmas of the modern world aren’t far from her mind, and the human cost of those issues are always lurking in the background.

However, lest you think Road to Ruin is solely about interpersonal angst and ethical introspection, I’m here to reassure you that it’s also one hell of an adventure. Lee is unafraid to lean hard into the action aspects of her dystopia, and there are plenty of frenetic chases, battles against both people and nature, as well as mutant magical dinosaurs, and any book that has mutant magical dinosaurs roaming a storm-blasted wasteland is automatically on the top of my list.

Overall, I devoured this book entirely in one sitting because I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. Road to Ruin is full of love, despair, courage, and most of all, heart, and Lee should be proud of what she’s crafted. If this is the first stop in Jin-Lu’s journey, I can’t wait to see where she goes from here.