osprey_archer: (books)
After I finished Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword, I begged [personal profile] skygiants and [personal profile] genarti to join me in reading the sequel. “It will be fun!” I assured them.

“Will it,” they said doubtfully.

“It will be an experience!” I insisted.

They could not argue with that, and so we embarked on the voyage of Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions.

This book picks up seconds after Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword picked up. Doi’s lookalike brother Hisashi has just returned from Shin, Peasprout is considering whether maybe she can transfer her affections from Doi-pretending-to-be-Hisashi to Hisashi himself, and also Hisashi brought along a girl who claims to be the Empress Dowager’s great-great-granddaughter.

Except that is ridiculous, because Wu Yinmei’s feet are unbound, and everyone knows that all the women in the Emperor’s family have bound feet! Clearly a spy, insists Peasprout. How can you insist that she’s a spy when everyone spent last year insisting YOU were a spy just because you come from Shin and also kept being accidentally in the vicinity of buildings that were being sabotaged? demand her friends. It’s DIFFERENT, insists Peasprout.

Well, maybe it’s different, or maybe Peasprout’s just jealous that her potential new love interest shows up with a potential girlfriend of his own in tow. Everyone else in Pearl is bowled over by Yinmei, a real live princess who is as beautifully tragic as the moon (as Peasprout herself grudgingly admits) and as sweet as a Disney princess, if Disney princesses sometimes took a break from warbling to the woodland creatures to say things like “If you attack an enemy city, the first thing you should do is capture the schools and take the children hostage.”

Yinmei/Peasprout MAY have overtaken Doi/Peasprout in my top shipping ranking, simply because Yinmei and Peasprout’s relationship may be even more deranged and emotionally fraught than Peasprout and Doi’s.

(Most boring relationship in the book: Peasprout and Hisashi. Relationship that seems most likely to be endgame: Peasprout/Hisashi. But book three isn’t out yet and if there’s one thing you can count on from Henry Lien, it’s bonkers plot twists, so I’m not losing hope.)

Anyway. In part because of Peasprout’s questionable life choices in book one, the city-state of Pearl and the empire of Shin are now on the brink of war. Thus, the Pearl Famous Academy of martial arts ice skating focuses its energy that year on discovering new defense strategies in case Shin attacks. The students divide into battle bands, which will battle each other for points to see which strategy works best.

After a hilarious scene where Peasprout and Doi both politely offer the other the leadership position, and then Doi politely offers again and Peasprout is like “THANK YOU absolutely I will take it,” Peasprout becomes leader of her battle band. As leading a battle band involves working with other people, Peasprout is not great at this job! As evidenced by the fact that her quarrel with her battle band members leads to the band naming itself “Nobody and the Fire Chickens.”

Other things that happen in this book:

If you magnetize sea water, you can ice skate on it because the magnetization will repel your skate blades.

Also, if you beat drums at the right frequency, you can hover above the Pearl and zoom around in little drum-powered hovercraft.

One of the battle bands goes into battle with all the members standing on each other’s shoulders or possibly on an armature to create a human kaiju? I don’t understand how this works.

Yinmei and Peasprout’s brother Cricket are both on the verge of DEATH because they have taken ivory yin salts, which depending on dosage delay male puberty or make it impossible for you to take more than five steps without your heart swelling like a balloon.

(Listen, this is a series where ice-skating martial arts is a serious war strategy, why would you expect “physics” or “biology” to work in a sensible way.)

GIANT CLIFFHANGER ENDING.

And unfortunately no sign of book three! Peasprout 1 came out in 2018, Peasprout 2 came out in 2019, and since then… there has been no Peasprout 3. It might still happen! But it also might not, in which case we’ll all be left on a massive cliffhanger. So in a sense it’s hard to recommend these books, but in another sense: my god, they are SUCH a wild ride. Simply an amazing time! Not always a good time exactly, but certainly an experience.
osprey_archer: (books)
A few months ago, [personal profile] skygiants reviewed Peasprout Chen: Future Legend of Skate and Sword. “This sounds UNHINGED,” I crowed, delighted and appalled and fascinated all at the same time. “Don’t have time to read it, though.”

Of course I ended up reading it.

Even if you have no desire to read a book about a girl who is Determined to Become the Ice-Skating Martial Arts Champion, it’s worthwhile to experience it vicariously through [personal profile] skygiants’ hilarious and on-point review. Also, the comments have some fascinating info about the probable influences on this book.

Even without this background info, however, I think it’s obvious from reading this book that Kevin Lien has watched a LOT of anime in his life. Moreover, he clearly adheres to the C. S. Lewis school of fantasy worldbuilding, where you throw in everything you love and who cares if anyone else thinks “talking animals and Greek mythology and Jesus don’t go together,” except Lien’s things are “sports anime and ice-skating martial arts battles and intense early teen lesbian drama and the geopolitical situation between China and Taiwan, but in a sometimes-goofy way where the Great Leap is literally millions of people jumping all at the same time to create an earthquake.”

Also amazing food descriptions, and a very distinctive voice for Peasprout, who is the very best martial arts ice skater in Shin and has been crowned Peony Brightstar by the Dowager Empress and is now in Pearl as a goodwill ambassador at their elite martial arts ice-skating academy, where everyone keeps telling her that the ending flourishes on her skating moves are SO out of fashion, but WHATEVER, the manual said that they’re the latest thing so Peasprout will continue her ending flourishes!

This tragic inability to learn anything except ice-skating martial arts unless it is explicitly spelled out for her (and often not even then) makes Peasprout a divisive character. Possibly because I went into the book forewarned, I loved Peasprout. She’s an amazing example of a certain type of person, who is superlatively good at one socially rewarded trait (in this case ice-skating martial arts, but you see this also with people who are good at football, math, music, etc.) and therefore doesn’t see the point of learning anything else. Music? Architecture? Social skills? She’s the Peony Level Brightstar! Why should she bother?

If she were thirty-four this would probably make me grind my teeth. But a lot of people are like this at fourteen – heck, I was like this at fourteen! Although less so than Peasprout because I was not the Peony Level Brightstar. And most of us learn some life lessons and move past it by the time we are twenty-two or so.

In fact, my only criticism is that at the end of the book, Peasprout suddenly starts learning these life lessons faster than seemed to me quite plausible. However, I have high hopes that in book two she will have backslid here and there. (Although hopefully not the one about My Little Brother Has a Different Life Path from Mine and That’s Okay. She’s trying so hard to be a good big sister in this book and she’s so bad at it and I really would like to see her level up there.)

Because yes! Not only am I reading book two (Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions), but I’ve induced [personal profile] skygiants to read it too. If you hear high tinny shrieking on the breeze, it’s probably the sound of the two of us screaming about Peasprout’s latest disaster choices.

Profile

osprey_archer: (Default)
osprey_archer

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   1 2 345
67 8 9101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 10th, 2025 10:54 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios