Book Review: The Ninja Daughter, by Tori Eldridge
#MeToo with ninjas in a pastiche feminist revenge fantasy.
Agora Books, 2019, 320 pages
The Ninja Daughter is an action-packed thriller about a Chinese-Norwegian modern-day ninja with Joy Luck Club family issues who fights the Los Angeles Ukrainian mob, sex traffickers, and her own family to save two desperate women and an innocent child.
After her sister is raped and murdered, Lily Wong dedicates her life and ninja skills to the protection of women. But her mission is complicated. Not only does she live above the Chinese restaurant owned by her Norwegian father and inspired by the recipes of her Chinese mother, but she has to hide her true self from her Hong Kong tiger mom, who is already disappointed at her less-than-feminine ways, and who would be horrified if she knew what she had become.
But when a woman and her son she escorted safely to an abused women’s shelter return home to dangerous consequences, Lily is forced to not only confront her family and her past, but team up with a mysterious - and very lethal - stranger to rescue them.
It's rare to read a book that mixes quite so many tropes and checks quite so many boxes and is quite so annoying.
Lily Wong is an American girl from LA with a Norwegian father and a Chinese mother. She practiced the art of Wu Shu until she was in college, when her 15-year-old sister was abducted, raped, and murdered. Thereupon Lily turns into a #MeToo Batman, training in the art of ninjutsu with a Japanese sensei so she can stalk the night, rescue abused women, and beat up their abusers.
I'll give every book a few "gimmes" in terms of suspension of disbelief. The better written, the more gimmes I will forgive. The Ninja Daughter was already pushing it with a 115-pound girl beating up men twice her size. (I'm sorry, neither wu shu and ninjutsu nor looking like Scarlett Johansson will make that possible.) The jarring cultural dissonance of a Chinese-Norwegian girl learning ninjutsu and calling herself a "kunoichi" (Japanese for female ninja) sounded like someone playing mix'n'match with a GURPS character sheet. Lily sustains herself with gigs from a lady who runs an abused women's shelter and somehow has the funds to pay Lily to go rescue women with ninja attacks.
And in between improbable fights with Ukrainian mobsters and Latino gangbangers, the heart of this book is really a women's fiction novel, with Lily trying to resolve her relationship with her tiger mom mother who just wants her to find a nice loaded Chinese-American boy and get married.
Lily gets courted by a loaded Chinese-American boy named Daniel (who's all full of dutiful Confucian traditionalism, which of course sets Lily's teeth on edge even though she spends all book talking about "honoring her ancestry" and how much she loves her multiple cultural heritages), but soon the real love interest appears in the form of... a hot Vietnamese assassin named Tran.
Oh yeah, there was some kind of plot involving mobsters, politicians, and real estate schemes in Los Angeles. Aside from Dangerous Steamy Tran, Dutiful Boring Daniel, and Lily's Norwegian baba who is a big blond Viking who cooks Chinese food like a native Hong Kong chef, basically every man in this book is a sleazeball. Lily is repeatedly leered at, groped, assaulted, and almost date raped, so much that I thought the author just liked writing about a "kunoichi" repeatedly punching men in the balls for getting handsy. Okay, author, I get it, men are pigs and you really wish you could ninja-kick them.
I guess if this story scratches your itch for feminist revenge fantasy, you might enjoy it, but I just found it annoying and tropey, and I'm certainly not interested enough to read the next book and find out about Dangerous Steamy Tran's traumatic childhood and why he turned into such a deadly hunk who probably needs a little kunoichi lovin' to find his soft cuddly center.
My complete list of book reviews.
Agora Books, 2019, 320 pages
The Ninja Daughter is an action-packed thriller about a Chinese-Norwegian modern-day ninja with Joy Luck Club family issues who fights the Los Angeles Ukrainian mob, sex traffickers, and her own family to save two desperate women and an innocent child.
After her sister is raped and murdered, Lily Wong dedicates her life and ninja skills to the protection of women. But her mission is complicated. Not only does she live above the Chinese restaurant owned by her Norwegian father and inspired by the recipes of her Chinese mother, but she has to hide her true self from her Hong Kong tiger mom, who is already disappointed at her less-than-feminine ways, and who would be horrified if she knew what she had become.
But when a woman and her son she escorted safely to an abused women’s shelter return home to dangerous consequences, Lily is forced to not only confront her family and her past, but team up with a mysterious - and very lethal - stranger to rescue them.
It's rare to read a book that mixes quite so many tropes and checks quite so many boxes and is quite so annoying.
Lily Wong is an American girl from LA with a Norwegian father and a Chinese mother. She practiced the art of Wu Shu until she was in college, when her 15-year-old sister was abducted, raped, and murdered. Thereupon Lily turns into a #MeToo Batman, training in the art of ninjutsu with a Japanese sensei so she can stalk the night, rescue abused women, and beat up their abusers.
I'll give every book a few "gimmes" in terms of suspension of disbelief. The better written, the more gimmes I will forgive. The Ninja Daughter was already pushing it with a 115-pound girl beating up men twice her size. (I'm sorry, neither wu shu and ninjutsu nor looking like Scarlett Johansson will make that possible.) The jarring cultural dissonance of a Chinese-Norwegian girl learning ninjutsu and calling herself a "kunoichi" (Japanese for female ninja) sounded like someone playing mix'n'match with a GURPS character sheet. Lily sustains herself with gigs from a lady who runs an abused women's shelter and somehow has the funds to pay Lily to go rescue women with ninja attacks.
And in between improbable fights with Ukrainian mobsters and Latino gangbangers, the heart of this book is really a women's fiction novel, with Lily trying to resolve her relationship with her tiger mom mother who just wants her to find a nice loaded Chinese-American boy and get married.
Lily gets courted by a loaded Chinese-American boy named Daniel (who's all full of dutiful Confucian traditionalism, which of course sets Lily's teeth on edge even though she spends all book talking about "honoring her ancestry" and how much she loves her multiple cultural heritages), but soon the real love interest appears in the form of... a hot Vietnamese assassin named Tran.
Oh yeah, there was some kind of plot involving mobsters, politicians, and real estate schemes in Los Angeles. Aside from Dangerous Steamy Tran, Dutiful Boring Daniel, and Lily's Norwegian baba who is a big blond Viking who cooks Chinese food like a native Hong Kong chef, basically every man in this book is a sleazeball. Lily is repeatedly leered at, groped, assaulted, and almost date raped, so much that I thought the author just liked writing about a "kunoichi" repeatedly punching men in the balls for getting handsy. Okay, author, I get it, men are pigs and you really wish you could ninja-kick them.
I guess if this story scratches your itch for feminist revenge fantasy, you might enjoy it, but I just found it annoying and tropey, and I'm certainly not interested enough to read the next book and find out about Dangerous Steamy Tran's traumatic childhood and why he turned into such a deadly hunk who probably needs a little kunoichi lovin' to find his soft cuddly center.
My complete list of book reviews.