The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy
Representation: Chinese-inspired setting and cast, minor queer character
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: 1625674902
Goodreads

Drawing on Chinese and Mongolian elements, award-winning poet Mary Soon Lee has penned an epic tale of politics, intrigue, and dragons perfect for fans of Game of Thrones and Beowulf.

As the fourth-born prince of Meqing, Xau was never supposed to be king. But when his three older brothers are all deemed unfit to rule and eaten by a dragon, as is the custom, Xau suddenly finds himself on the Meqinese throne. The early years of his reign are marred by brutal earthquakes and floods, and the long-simmering tension with the neighbouring country of Innis finally erupts into war. Worst of all, demons rise out of legend to walk the realm again, leaving death and destruction in their wake. In a desperate gamble, Xau must broker an uneasy peace with his former enemies and hope their combined strength is enough to vanquish the demons before it's too late.

The Sign of the Dragon is comprised of over 300 individual poems, including the Rhysling-winning "Interregnum." The first 60 poems appeared in the 2015 Dark Renaissance Books publication Crowned, which won the 2016 Elgin Award, and many individual poems have appeared in award-winning literary magazines such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Spillway, and Strange Horizons. Collected together in its entirety for the very first time, with over 200 never-before-published poems, readers can finally enjoy King Xau's story of sacrifice and war and dragons from beginning to end.

Highlights

~a snarky dragon
~horse-magic
~bodyguards to die for
~a most imperial cat
~brace for all the Feels

The Sign of the Dragon is not like any book you’ve ever read before, for a few reasons.

The most immediate and obvious is that each chapter is a poem. The reaction this has gotten, when I mentioned it to a few of my nearest and dearest, has universally been one of alarm: the idea of poetry is much more intimidating than prose, apparently! But there’s no need to be intimidated: speaking as someone who rarely Gets poetry, I found The Sign of the Dragon wonderfully easy to read and understand – so much so that at first I wasn’t sure why Lee had written the story in poem-form at all. As far as I could tell (not that my opinion is ever worth much re poetry) the poem-format wasn’t really doing anything. So why hadn’t this been written as prose instead?

In the distance, fire:
a lithe, live light leaping tree to tree.

I’m sure I missed a lot of what Lee was doing, but I did gradually realise that, actually, the poem-format was doing a lot. The part that was clearest to me was how writing this as a long (over 500 pages on my ereader) series of poems distilled the story; this book would have had to be three or four books if Lee had been writing in prose, because it would have been impossible to be as succinct in prose as poetry allowed her to be (at least, not without massively worsening the quality). Each poem captures the core of the scene or event that’s being written about, goes for the heart of the story and skips an immense amount of set-dressing.

But this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing – ‘extraneous’ is a terrible word, because it implies that what is not plot-relevant has little value, and that’s not correct. Lee could have used the distilling power of poetry to give us only plot, and I’m sure that would still have been wonderful, but it wouldn’t have been as breathcatching as The Sign of the Dragon turned out to be. Amidst the politicking and magic are quiet moments between Xau and his wife, Xau and his children, and the adventures of the palace cat. (The perspective of that last, by the way, is hysterical!) These add a softness to the epic that is not extraneous, that is in fact vital: this would be a very different book without them, and Xau would not be the living myth he is if he were not gentle, and if we did not get to see and experience the gentleness of him and around him.

Li stood,
watching over his king,
as the stars swept out the hours.

Xau is the heart of this book, and Lee does something genuinely incredible, and inspiring, with his character. I think there’s an idea that wholly good people don’t make for believable, or realistic, characters in Adult fiction; that kind of person belongs to fairytales, to stories that are simpler and therefore considered lesser. (Wrongly, but that’s a whole separate thesis!) But Xau is that good a person, so good he hearkens back to the fairytales you first heard when you were little, so good he should be hard to believe in. But he isn’t hard to believe in, because Lee expertly leads us in his footsteps, shows us his humanity so viscerally we can’t fail to believe it – we see him ill, exhausted, wounded, playing with his children, grieving, being lovestruck. We see how much he agonises over the difficult, necessary choices that comes with kingship. We see his discomfort with acclaim, how awkward he is with the spotlight, how he isn’t the legendary once-in-a-generation kind of warrior. He is real – he acts as so many of us would act (see: his relationship to his body-guards, a powerful, beautiful thread woven throughout the whole novel) – and because he is real… Because he is real, Lee slips him past our cynicism and you find your faith in humanity blossoming petal by petal in your chest, coming back to life like a resurrection plant given water.

(The water is your own breathless, aching tears, because oh, it hurts to feel shrivelled faith un-shrivel.)

Reinforcing this is that Xau is the only one like this. The rest of the cast are more ‘typical’, doing their best but, you know – imperfect. Mortal. And they, too, feel the awe, the disbelief – and then the wonder as that disbelief is gently dissolved – when faced with Xau. At no point does Lee, or the world she’s created, act as though Xau is normal – he surprises and inspires his friends and court and family as much as he does the reader. Seeing how many of the characters grow and become better people because he’s inspired them to do so is a small but wonderful part of the book, as are all those moments when people who don’t believe a word of Xau’s reputation are poleaxed when they meet him and discover that no, he really is as impossibly wonderful as the poets say. It’s a reminder of the kind of influence an individual can have, an influence that has nothing to do with kings and conventional power – the way that a determination to be good can change a world, bit by bit, slowly and quietly. Xau’s world is a normal world, and the contrast between him and his setting is just – it’s beautiful. It only makes him more beautiful, as a person, a soul, that he can be so good in a world that has just as many evils and darknesses as ours does.

The succinctness allowed by writing in poetry instead of prose allows Lee to give us so much more story than most novels can. The Sign of the Dragon isn’t one adventure: it’s many, because the book covers Xau’s entire life, and life doesn’t have just one big quest and then it’s done. There are wars and many kinds of politics, there are multiple kinds of magic, there’s international intrigue and drama within the palace and court. Those who set themselves up as Xau’s enemies – there isn’t just one, alas. This struck me as very believable, but also reminded me of epic myths – Xau is a hero, albeit not a terribly traditional one (just wait till you learn what his hero-power is!) and heroes often have to ride out over and over again. Heroes never get to finish, and they rarely get to rest. It doesn’t make the idea of being a hero very appealing, and I was heartbroken (and often terrified) for Xau. By the final third of the book, I wanted to drop each new villain in a volcano because HOW DARE THEY COME FOR THIS WONDERFUL MAN?

And of course, the multiple plots or adventures means there is always something interesting happening, for us readers! Although even the less dramatic plotlines – the softer ones, where Xau is a bit less mythic and a bit more mortal – were riveting for me. I thought Lee balanced the adventures with the softness perfectly; neither one ever outweighed the other for very long, and that was one of many elements that makes this book so special, so unique. The humanity woven in with the legend. I think that helped make it all feel more real, more true, as well; I can’t think of a single myth that shows me a hero fishing with his son, and getting that kind of thing here…made me believe in it even more. If that makes any sense at all.

The Sign of the Dragon is a myth-maker – or maybe it would be better to say, it’s the record of a myth, a myth’s life-cycle, from its first seeds to its riotous, searing blooming. We watch the myth be made, be grown; we watch it form, and only grow greater and greater because Xau never stops. Never. But it’s more than a myth, too, more than just a wonderful story (if there’s ever anything ‘just’ about a wonderful story): it’s an inspiration. It’s a renewal of your hope, fuel for your guttering heart-flame. It’s a soul-shaker, and I understand if you, too, are intimidated by the idea of a novel-in-verse – but I’m pleading with you to give it a chance anyway. Just writing up this review has had me in tears, being hit with the beauty and emotion of this book all over again. You can’t imagine what actually reading it is like!

Xau might not be a once-in-a-generation warrior – but his story is a once-in-a-generation book.

So go read it already!!!

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