Princess Hesina of Yan has always been eager to shirk the responsibilities of the crown, dreaming of an unremarkable life. But when her beloved father is found dead, she’s thrust into power, suddenly the 
queen of a surprisingly unstable kingdom. What’s more, Hesina believes that her father was murdered—and that the killer is someone close to her.
Hesina’s court is packed full of dissemblers and deceivers eager to use the king’s death for political gain, each as plausibly guilty as the next. Her advisers would like her to blame the neighboring kingdom of Kendi’a, whose ruler has been mustering for war. Determined to find her father’s actual killer, Hesina does something desperate: she enlists the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death, since magic was outlawed centuries ago.
Using the information provided by the sooth, and uncertain if she can trust her family, Hesina turns to Akira—a brilliant investigator who’s also a convicted criminal with secrets of his own. With the future of Yan at stake, can Hesina find justice for her father? Or will the cost be too high?
Book cover and synopsis from GoodReads.
I had heard talk about Descendant of the Crane on book Twitter for a while, so when the author decided to do a giveaway, I figured: why not? When I won, I was thrilled, but completely unprepared for the masterclass in storytelling that I was about to receive.
It is hard to believe that DotC is Joan He’s debut novel. The story is so well-crafted that it feels like something made by a seasoned author, not someone who was a SENIOR in HIGH SCHOOL when she first started it. (It’s fine, I’m not jealous or questioning what I’ve done with my life…) The story quickly sucked me in, and I read this roughly 400-page novel in just a few days because I simply couldn’t put it down.
Descendant of the Crane takes place in a Chinese-inspired fantasy country called Yan. Joan carefully and cleverly builds this world layer by layer, giving us all the information we need without dumping in chunks of expository text. As the main character, Hesina, learns about being queen of Yan, we naturally learn more about the country itself. There are a few times when it seems like Hesina gets a little nostalgic solely for the benefit of telling the reader something about the world, but since Hesina’s father was killed, it also makes sense she’d be a little more reminiscent than usual. And I would always rather learn about the world through the eyes of an interesting character, rather than having a narrator drop in paragraphs of information.
On a similar note, the magic system was so unique and such a fresh take on what could have been a tired trope of fortunetellers. The sooths are the strongest fantasy thread in the book, and they hold up this responsibility well. At the start, we only know that sooths can See into the future, and they have been demonized and systematically executed because of their abilities for centuries. Rumors swirl about other powers they may have, but neither the reader nor the characters know what is true, what is gossip, and what might have once been true but now no longer is. I don’t want to talk in too much detail about the sooths, because spoilers, and it would just be me fangirling over the cleverness and ingenuity of Joan’s creation anyway. So once you read it, send me a message and we can freak out together.
By far the strongest component of the book is its plot. Ultimately, it is the story of political intrigue, and a young queen trying to do what is best for everyone in her country, while still crippled from grief over her father’s death and conflicted about the treatment of sooths in Yan. I don’t watch/read a lot of political dramas, but this one kept me rapt. It is the perfect balance of political maneuvering with action scenes. We don’t spend the entire novel inside the castle, allowing both us and the characters to breathe and explore the world more. And when we are in the castle, it is so hard to know who’s on which sides, it’s just as suspenseful as any of the fight scenes.
That said, I didn’t find it hard to follow. One review I’d read mentioned making a sort of character map to keep all the characters and who they supported straight, so I was bracing myself to have to focus hard on keeping track of everything. But while the plot is intricate and some characters are duplicitous, since we see everything through Hesina’s eyes, I thought it was relatively straight-forward to know who was on which side, at least in the moment until things changed. Maybe also reading it in just a couple of days helped…
The one thing I did feel the book was lacking was some character building. The narrative is first person from Hesina, so we do get a good sense of her character arc, but I kept finding myself wishing we could just take a beat and spend some time with the other secondary characters. Probably the relationship that shows the most growth is between Hesina and her brother, Sanjing, which is interesting because he spends much of the book away leading the army as Yan’s general. Hesina’s relationships with her adopted brother and sister, Caiyan and Lilian, her half-brother Rou, or her mysterious representative, Akira, aren’t given very much page time to develop. It feels a little bit like the reader is expected to care for them simply because Hesina does, rather than giving us moments of pure character interaction to truly allow the reader to care for them because of what we see them doing. It was a very packed book already, so I understand that the focus is on the plot and weaving everything together, but if a little more time had been spent on helping the reader connect with the characters, the stakes of the plot would have felt even heavier as it moved toward the climax.
Overall, this was a spectacular debut, and I gasped several times while reading it. Joan’s writing style is also beautiful, and I was taking mental notes of how she creates gorgeous descriptions with just a few words so I can try and emulate in my own novel! I am already itching for the second one in the series, and can’t wait to read more of Joan’s work.
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Are you planning on reading Descendant of the Crane? Have you already read it? What did you think? Let me know in the comments!
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