After reading Blood over Bright Haven (and honestly, being very impressed by the writing and plot) I figured, why not, let me read another of M.L. Wang’s stand alone novels. So here is Sword of Kaigen. I went into this book blind. Like, completely blind. And honestly, that was a mistake.
To start with, calling this a standalone novel isn’t true. This is a spinoff novel. Apparently. this is a prequel to her first series, the Theonite series. And let me just say, this book is significantly, significantly, so significantly, worse for it. I mean, it has the biggest flaw that every prequel spinoff has, being forced to stay aligned to the continuity of the original series, and line up with *future* events. Now, I haven’t read the Theonite series (and we’ll get to *this* point later too) but you can kinda tell that because of that forced continuity, this book has plot and pacing issues galore.
First, I want to address the world building. It’s poor. Like, piss poor. Like, a 12 year old watched Avatar TLA and decided to write their own world (spoiler, she made this world when she was 12). The world building elements are just not good. Random real words are replaced by others. Why did we need new words for minutes, or second, or distance. There are more than a handful of sentences that make no fucking sense because it sounds like someone did a find and replace on normal words. Like, “It took the enemy seconds to close the distance between them” would genuinely become a sentence like “the fonyakalu took two dinma to close the milliclick between them” and it’s just…. dumb. There are some world building elements you replace and some you don’t, things that are common parlance in speech tend not to have replacement words. (We’ll get to this point again later).
Second, the pacing in this book is bad. The big climax of the book, the big all out war/battle, happens half way through the book, and lasts like, 15% of the book. And it’s followed by the most utterly maddening clean up. We spend, no joke, a solid 40% of the book watching the two main characters (the mom/wife Misaki and oldest child Momoru) basically describe a life living in an abusive relationship. Constant verbal abuse backed by physical abuse. Constant *almost textbook* domestic abuse against both of them. This part is just drawn out and is geniunely, probably 30% padded with scenes of abuse. And what’s the payoff for all this abuse? Why, Misaki learns that her abuser isolated himself emotionally from his family to bE ThE mOuNtAiN, and *she turns around and forgives him*. This part made me actually scream in my room. Like, just textbook stocklholme syndrome events. Takeru (her abusive husband) has basically zero redeeming moments for 80% of the book, and then has a singular speech and we’re supposed to forgive him. Absolutely braindead. Oh and the last thing about the pacing, there are two separate passages in this book where the author does this flash forward thing referencing the future, which is bizarre because you’re setting up a Checkov’s gun. (We’ll get to this point later again again). And then the books ends like Iron Man 1 ended, with your Captain Fury backdoor introducing you to a larger universe.
Oh and then you have the two, randomly placed, scenes of Misaki’s school days. Like, actually just two chapters worth. It’s written as if there is a payoff. There isn’t. Gun number 2.
The fights were well written, and the combat was well written. I somehow managed to get through it and then looked up the book. And then all the pieces fell in place.
The tldr of the blog post is, she stopped writing the series, because the world building was fundamentally flawed. And so I looked up the book descriptions on goodreads.
The world building was an Isekai. The entire Theonite series was an isekai. The plot of the first book is, the baby from the end of THIS book travels to Earth from their world to hunt some people. It’s a parallel dimension to earth. And then the second book has the short summary line “and the disappointing son of an otherwise powerful warrior family. ” Ah so that explains Sword of Kaigen. We had to join the character who’s 5 in this book, to the one from her second book.
It’s a parallel world, that’s why the entire world building was “what if it was upside down earth” but literally. Like, what if the map was upside down. What if in stead of white people enslaving black people, it was the other way around. What if instead of the japanese invading china/korea, it was the koreans and chinese who bullied the japanese with wars and occupation and condescension.
All the replacements words are because in the original, you probably had to have your “Cultural shock” as they use different words and units of measurements and religions. So non earth person visiting earth can’t know what a minute is, it has to be a Dinma (or w/e I stopped caring). You have to eventually reconcile the abusive father and abused mother, because the child has to grow up to become a side character. You have to show flashbacks, because those flashbacks introduce the Firebird side character, who is a main character in the mainline series. For a spinoff ‘standalone’ there are a lot of references to the mainline series.
Sword of Kaigen is… a book I read. And of the books I’ve read in the last year, this is a book that most desperately needs a rewrite, if only to just write away all the terrible, terrible, forced ties to the main series. Get rid of all the random vocabulary, get rid of the forced canon events. Flesh out Misaki some more as a character and give her an actual arc beyond ‘meek abused wife for 50% of the book, fights at the end of the battle/war, and relies on her husband to give her autonomy’. Make Takeru *not* a massively abusive piece of crap, and give him redeemable characteristics. Heck, if you do all that, you could end up with a real start to a real new series.
Some part of me wanted to read the Theonite series after this, but knowing that 1) the series is perma hiatus and 2) it’s somehow worse written than this what with the juvenile world building, both of these make me not want to read it at all. I’m not even sure what kind of plot that series could have. SoK sets up a world where clearly the peasant uprising is justified, but the MCs are against it, so what plot could the main series have that could expand to the kind of “save the world” plot that SoK sets up? So I guess I’ll just read some summaries instead.
Need to find a new book to read, and I really don’t want to have to American Royals 4…
I realize I never explained the title. Which is basically, a lot of the battle in the middle reminded me of the show Shogun, which had at least a decent amount of gratuity in it. But also, in that show, there was a genuinely character arc for Toranaga. And this book does a good job of mirroring that. But the weird interspersal of Misaki’s school days, and this grand conspiracy about the world, and the random super modern tech vs middle age village with magic aspect of the world, just kinda ruined what could genuinely be like, middle age japan but with magic and a reverse history. except instead, we get what is really a lot of nudge nudge wink wink at my other series, because if you read those first, you understand the references to the rest of the world, but otherwise…