By Audrey Fong
Fall Out Boy just ended their first stadium tour; Olivia Rodrigo recently announced her single, “Vampire,” with an Instagram carousel featuring a photo of her with a Twilight poster; and Something Corporate started an Instagram, igniting reunion tour rumors.
It’s almost like I’m back in middle school. And I’m here for all of it —black skinny jeans, Team Edward buttons, and of course, Percy Jackson. My friends and I loved Rick Riordan’s Greek mythology-inspired series, which is so fundamental to my generation’s literary canon that when my English professor asked my class how many of us mostly learned Greek mythology through Percy Jackson, the majority of us raised our hands.
Riordan’s ability to blend mythology so easily into a magical coming-of-age story about the pursuit of something beyond yourself (Saving the world! Stopping evil!) is what drew me to Julia Vee’s and Ken Bebelle’s Ebony Gate, the first novel in the Phoenix Hoard series.
At first glance, the two series have a lot in common — a protagonist who doesn’t seem gifted yet is tremendously powerful, the weaving of ancient folklore with the contemporary world, and plenty of action to propel the story forward.
However, unlike Percy Jackson, Ebony Gate brings in Asian mythology such as shinigami, dragons, and yôkai. The protagonist, Emiko Soong, is the daughter of one of the novel’s eight Dragon Hoard Custodian Clans, all of whom have left the dragon realm and now live on Earth. Before the novel begins, Emiko was the Soong’s blade: a mercenary position in which she defended her family’s honor at any cost, earning her the title of “the Butcher of Beijing.” Wanting to leave her gory past behind, Emiko quits her position and flees to San Francisco.
Unfortunately, Emiko is unable to fully leave behind her past and is still active in the Jiāren world, the magical side of Earth that the clans run. Emiko is forced to pause her new life and return to her old, when “someone had activated a Soong Talon. Someone had called in a blood marker against our family, an iron-clad debt that held our family’s power as collateral.” It turns out that a shinigami, a death god, has actually activated a Tanaka (Emiko’s mom’s family) Talon, so it is up to Emiko to answer it in order to protect her younger brother and future leader of the Soong Clan, Tatsuya, from the dangerous journey that lies ahead — finding and restoring the titular Ebony Gate, which prevents ghosts from escaping into the living world. If she fails to fulfill the call, the shinigami will use her soul to seal the underworld instead.
Ebony Gate is an intertextual delight for anyone that has consumed their fair share of fantasy novels. Within its pages are ideas that we have seen before yet executed in a way that feels natural and fresh, speaking to the way the best artists in the world imitate and innovate upon previous art (even Shakespeare did so – he was constantly referencing and building off of Petrarch, the father of sonnets, in his own sonnets). For example, there is a split between the magical Jiāren and the ordinary Wàiren, echoing the split between wizards and muggles in Harry Potter. Even the choice of terms — Jiāren translating to family and Wàiren translating to outside people — calls to mind a common us vs them mindset. And like Percy Jackson, there is a sort of filter that prevents Wàiren from seeing the magic around them, a phenomenon that is especially apparent when Wàiren sees Emiko’s gigantic, animated foo lion and believes it’s a dog. These tropes offer familiarity in a novel that is otherwise full of new mythology and unfamiliar context.
The context needed to understand Emiko’s past – why she’s running away from Beijing and her family’s expectations, why she’s traumatized, what happened to the clans that they had to leave the Dragon realm, etc. — is fed to us in bits and pieces throughout the novel, yet the way it impacts Emiko appears early on, often before we are told of her history, rendering the reader’s understanding of why she’s so desperate to change or why she is so protective of Tatsuya difficult. This lack of understanding makes Ebony Gate initially difficult to enter.
Additionally, without fully detailed scenes of her work as the Blade or of her family life, her desire to change repeated nearly every chapter reads more like Riverdale’s Veronica Lodge rather than Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf. What marks the difference between Veronica and Blair is how much believable backstory the viewer is given. In other words, without proper scenes showing the reader what Emiko was like pre-San Francisco, her desire to change feels forced upon the reader and is brought up too often, resulting in unnecessary passages.
Given that Ebony Gate is over 400 pages long, it would’ve been useful to minimize the number of mentions of Emiko’s wish to change and to cut down on some of the actions of each scene in order to provide the reader with extra scenes that would flesh out her background and give the reader a better understanding of the Jiāren world, its politics, and its history.
That being said, Ebony Gate is not a book without its merits.
At its core, Ebony Gate is a reimagining of a hero’s tale, centering a 20-something Asian female in a world where everyone is more powerful than she is, speaking to some common Asian American experiences: feeling othered in a white society, feeling less than in a society that expects you to succeed academically and careerwise, and not being seen as strong due to submissive portrayals of Asian women. Yet, between Emiko’s outspoken personality and the way the other Jiāren characters range in Asian identity — Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese, Chinese, etc. — Ebony Gate provides a wide range of what it looks like to be an Asian American hero beyond the overly polished Marvel heroes in Shang Chi (which only features Chinese heroes), whether it’s being a glamorous fashionista fighting in Chanel slingbacks or a relaxed surfer who can still be counted on during a Talon Call.
Some readers may criticize their combat skills as playing into stereotypes that all Asians are Kung Fu masters, but as the characters battle in sandals and board shorts, devour steamed pork buns, and scream “So witnessed!” when documenting important events, it becomes clear that Vee and Bebelle are creating a new sort of fantasy story, departing from mystical Shaolin mountains filmed in China and from the white-centered fantasy series many of us grew up reading.
Ebony Gate is an ambitious novel. It places Asian American characters front and center in a fantasy adventure. It builds off of what made Percy Jackson so great — the juxtaposition of ancient myths and the modern world all seen through the lens of young characters — and creates a space in which Asian readers can imagine themselves more easily than, say, Camp Halfblood.
Ebony Gate is available from Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, Green Apple Books, Kinokuniya, Laguna Beach Books, and Queen Anne Book Company.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.