Russ Allbery: Review: Dragon Pearl

Review: Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee

Dragon Pearl is a middle-grade space fantasy based on Korean
mythology and the first book of a series.

Min is a fourteen-year-old girl living on the barely-terraformed world of
Jinju with her extended family. Her older brother Jun passed the entrance
exams for the Academy and left to join the Thousand Worlds Space Forces,
and Min is counting the years until she can do the same. Those plans are
thrown into turmoil when an official investigator appears at their door
claiming that Jun deserted to search for the Dragon Pearl. A series of
impulsive fourteen-year-old decisions lead to Min heading for a spaceport
alone, determined to find her brother and prove his innocence.

This would be a rather improbable quest for a young girl, but Min is a
gumiho, one of the supernaturals who live in the Thousand Worlds alongside
non-magical humans. Unlike the more respectable dragons, tigers, goblins,
and shamans, gumiho are viewed with suspicion and distrust because their
powers are useful for deception. They are natural shapeshifters who can
copy the shapes of others, and their Charm ability lets them influence
people’s thoughts and create temporary illusions of objects such as ID
cards. It will take all of Min’s powers, and some rather lucky
coincidences, to infiltrate the Space Forces and determine what happened
to her brother.

It’s common for reviews of this book to open with a caution that this is a
middle-grade adventure novel and you should not expect a story like
Ninefox Gambit. I will be boring and
repeat that caution. Dragon Pearl has a single first-person
viewpoint and a very linear and straightforward plot. Adult readers are
unlikely to be surprised by plot twists; the fun is the world-building and
seeing how Min manages to work around plot obstacles.

The world-building is enjoyable but not very rigorous. Min uses and abuses
Charm with the creative intensity of a Dungeons & Dragons
min-maxer. Each individual event makes sense given the implication that
Min is unusually powerful, but I’m dubious about the surrounding society
and lack of protections against Charm given what Min is able to do. Min
does say that gumiho are rare and many people think they’re extinct, which
is a bit of a fig leaf, but you’ll need to bring your urban fantasy
suspension of disbelief skills to this one.

I did like that the world-building conceit went more than skin deep and
influenced every part of the world. There are ghosts who are critical to
the plot. Terraforming is done through magic, hence the quest for the
Dragon Pearl and the miserable state of Min’s home planet due to its loss.
Medical treatment involves the body’s meridians, as does engineering: The
starships have meridians similar to those of humans, and engineers partly
merge with those meridians to adjust them. This is not the sort of book
that tries to build rigorous scientific theories or explain them to the
reader, and I’m not sure everything would hang together if you poked at it
too hard, but Min isn’t interested in doing that poking and the story
doesn’t try to justify itself. It’s mostly a vibe, but it’s a vibe that I
enjoyed and that is rather different than other space fantasy I’ve read.

The characters were okay but never quite clicked for me, in part because
proper character exploration would have required Min take a detour from
her quest to find her brother and that was not going to happen. The reader
gets occasional glimpses of a military SF cadet story and a friendship on
false premises story, but neither have time to breathe because Min drops
any entanglement that gets in the way of her quest. She’s almost amoral in
a way that I found believable but not quite aligned with my reading mood.
I also felt a bit wrong-footed by how her friendships developed; saying
too much more would be a spoiler, but I was expecting more human
connection than I got.

I think my primary disappointment with this book was something I knew
going in, not in any way its fault, and part of the reason why I’d put off
reading it: This is pitched at young teenagers and didn’t have quite
enough plot and characterization complexity to satisfy me. It’s a linear,
somewhat episodic adventure story with some neat world-building, and it
therefore glides over the spots where an adult novel would have added
political and factional complexity. That is exactly as advertised, so it’s
up to you whether that’s the book you’re in the mood for.

One warning: The text of this book opens with an introduction by Rick
Riordan that is just fluff marketing and that spoils the first few
chapters of the book. It is unmarked as such at the beginning and tricked
me into thinking it was the start of the book proper, and then deeply
annoyed me. If you do read this book, I recommend skipping the utterly
pointless introduction and going straight to chapter one.

Followed by Tiger Honor.

Rating: 6 out of 10