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Of all the books in Laurence Yep's long, generation-spanning, loosely-linked historical fiction series about a Chinese family's relationship with America, I'm pretty sure that The Serpent's Children and Mountain Light are the only two that directly follow the same characters - Cassia, the mom of the protagonist from Dragon's Gate, is the narrator of the first book and the secondary lead in the second, and in both she is AMAZING. I just have to laugh at the cover of Mountain Light, which is all 'man protect Cassia!', because all that ever happens in both books is Cassia kicking everyone's ass. Cassia is pretty much a wuxia heroine, I'm not even kidding.
So The Serpent's Children starts with tiny Cassia and her even tinier brother Foxfire, children of "the Gallant," their village's most awesome warrior who has gone away to fight in the revolution against the Manchus. After their mom dies, the kids quickly run into trouble with their other relatives, who want to take them in and bind Cassia's feet so she can make a good match. Cassia is not down with this - bound feet will not help her fight for the revolution! - so, in a step that moves her straight through 'spunky' and into 'EXTREME,' she locks herself and her baby brother in the house, grabs up a giant butcher knife, and informs all her relatives that she will stab them in the face if anyone comes any closer.
. . . they mostly leave her alone after that.
The rest of the focus of the book is on the conflicts between Cassia, who is everything her father wants his kids to be (badass, fervently revolutionary, proficient with weapons and martial arts) and Foxfire the dreamer, who doesn't believe in violence and has all these wacky plans like 'go away to America and get rich'; Cassia and the rest of the village, who are not big fans of the whole family after the butcher knife incident; Cassia and the evil village next door, which keeps coming to steal their already-failing crops; and Cassia and herself, convinced she's failing at taking care of her family.
I love Cassia, but to be honest The Serpent's Children feels sort of like half a book, so I wanted to wait and see what happened in Mountain Light, which is . . . A STAR-CROSSED ROMANCE. I was extremely curious, because, as I've said before, I'd never seen Laurence Yep write romance ever and I wanted to know how he'd do it. The answer is, HILARIOUSLY.
Mountain Light is from the POV of Squeaky, who comes from the enemy village next door and runs into Cassia and her dad and their giant friend Tiny a few years after the end of Mountain Light while they're all off fighting in THE REVOLUTION. By 'runs into,' I mean of course that Cassia handily kicks his ass and threatens to kill him before her dad is all "children, children, we're temporarily on the same side!" This is of course the cue for a WACKY ROAD TRIP.
SQUEAKY: *attempts to charm Cassia with jokes*
CASSIA: You know what happens to funny people in a battle, clown boy? THEY DIE.
But by the time they get home (after some tragedy along the way) they have bonded enough that they don't like the idea of going back to their respective feuding villages and never seeing each other again. So they decide to sneak out and meet up for SECRET MEETINGS IN THE CEMETARY . . . to talk! And be friends! And commiserate about how their villages both seem to be getting steadily more prejudiced against their friends in the local ethnic minority group and that's not cool!
(SQUEAKY'S FATHER FIGURE: So you're defying your whole village to sneak out to have secret meetings with this enemy girl, IN A CEMETARY, because . . . you're just friends?
SQUEAKY: YES. WHAT. YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE.)
It takes most of the book for them to sort of quietly decide that their definition of friendship might eventually include marriage and babies, and it's seriously adorable. (I also love when Squeaky finally meets Foxfire, and Foxfire's reaction is fifty percent "how dare this jerk from an enemy village date my sister!" and fifty percent ". . . seriously, ew, why would anyone want to date my annoying big sister?")
Meanwhile, most of the actual action in the book after they get home from the revolution focuses on the rising antagonism against the ethnic minority group, which - hm. I think, if this were a book translated from Chinese into English, I'd side-eye it a bit, because the focus is on how Cassia and Squeaky stand up to their villages and nobly fight to protect their non-POV, mostly-doomed ethnic minority friends, and . . . yeah. But . . . this book was published in the US, and honestly, you know, it's a kid's book with basically no white people in it that talks about how China is not a cultural monolith. I'll take it!
(There are also a few chapters at the end set in America. Cassia does not get to go to America because, as Squeaky explains, if she went to America she would shoot everyone there for being assholes and this could be sort of a problem.)
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/243515.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
So The Serpent's Children starts with tiny Cassia and her even tinier brother Foxfire, children of "the Gallant," their village's most awesome warrior who has gone away to fight in the revolution against the Manchus. After their mom dies, the kids quickly run into trouble with their other relatives, who want to take them in and bind Cassia's feet so she can make a good match. Cassia is not down with this - bound feet will not help her fight for the revolution! - so, in a step that moves her straight through 'spunky' and into 'EXTREME,' she locks herself and her baby brother in the house, grabs up a giant butcher knife, and informs all her relatives that she will stab them in the face if anyone comes any closer.
. . . they mostly leave her alone after that.
The rest of the focus of the book is on the conflicts between Cassia, who is everything her father wants his kids to be (badass, fervently revolutionary, proficient with weapons and martial arts) and Foxfire the dreamer, who doesn't believe in violence and has all these wacky plans like 'go away to America and get rich'; Cassia and the rest of the village, who are not big fans of the whole family after the butcher knife incident; Cassia and the evil village next door, which keeps coming to steal their already-failing crops; and Cassia and herself, convinced she's failing at taking care of her family.
I love Cassia, but to be honest The Serpent's Children feels sort of like half a book, so I wanted to wait and see what happened in Mountain Light, which is . . . A STAR-CROSSED ROMANCE. I was extremely curious, because, as I've said before, I'd never seen Laurence Yep write romance ever and I wanted to know how he'd do it. The answer is, HILARIOUSLY.
Mountain Light is from the POV of Squeaky, who comes from the enemy village next door and runs into Cassia and her dad and their giant friend Tiny a few years after the end of Mountain Light while they're all off fighting in THE REVOLUTION. By 'runs into,' I mean of course that Cassia handily kicks his ass and threatens to kill him before her dad is all "children, children, we're temporarily on the same side!" This is of course the cue for a WACKY ROAD TRIP.
SQUEAKY: *attempts to charm Cassia with jokes*
CASSIA: You know what happens to funny people in a battle, clown boy? THEY DIE.
But by the time they get home (after some tragedy along the way) they have bonded enough that they don't like the idea of going back to their respective feuding villages and never seeing each other again. So they decide to sneak out and meet up for SECRET MEETINGS IN THE CEMETARY . . . to talk! And be friends! And commiserate about how their villages both seem to be getting steadily more prejudiced against their friends in the local ethnic minority group and that's not cool!
(SQUEAKY'S FATHER FIGURE: So you're defying your whole village to sneak out to have secret meetings with this enemy girl, IN A CEMETARY, because . . . you're just friends?
SQUEAKY: YES. WHAT. YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE.)
It takes most of the book for them to sort of quietly decide that their definition of friendship might eventually include marriage and babies, and it's seriously adorable. (I also love when Squeaky finally meets Foxfire, and Foxfire's reaction is fifty percent "how dare this jerk from an enemy village date my sister!" and fifty percent ". . . seriously, ew, why would anyone want to date my annoying big sister?")
Meanwhile, most of the actual action in the book after they get home from the revolution focuses on the rising antagonism against the ethnic minority group, which - hm. I think, if this were a book translated from Chinese into English, I'd side-eye it a bit, because the focus is on how Cassia and Squeaky stand up to their villages and nobly fight to protect their non-POV, mostly-doomed ethnic minority friends, and . . . yeah. But . . . this book was published in the US, and honestly, you know, it's a kid's book with basically no white people in it that talks about how China is not a cultural monolith. I'll take it!
(There are also a few chapters at the end set in America. Cassia does not get to go to America because, as Squeaky explains, if she went to America she would shoot everyone there for being assholes and this could be sort of a problem.)
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/243515.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.