Thursday, June 20, 2013

2013 book 173

Jane Linskold's Thirteen Orphans
I really love books that feature magic in the modern world. Here, a young woman is on a trip with her father, about to be let in on a family secret--that he's descended from a group of twelve wizards/scholars who were exiled from China, smuggling out the baby emperor when they went, and she's destined to be his heir, taking on the mantle of the Rat from the Chinese zodiac. One of the coolest things about this book, to me, was that the two main/POV characters were both women. Besides college student Brenda, there's Pearl, an 80-year-old former child star (who's half Chinese and half Jewish, which comes up a few times, to my delight) who's also the Tiger from the zodiac. It's just nice to have a badass old lady around in a fantasy book. Anyway, just as Brenda is about to discover her heritage, they discover that the whole group is being targeted--but by who, and why? I enjoyed this so much that I had to force myself not to stay up all night finishing it, and now I am off to read the sequels. A/A-.

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