In A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang, Lufeng—a Wind Walker with skin made of bark and hair made of needle threads—is to be married to the King of the Land Wanderers in exchange for the temporary cessation of industrial destruction on the Wind Walkers’ homeland, Feng. Lufeng is willing, reluctantly, to do this out of a sense of duty—not only to her homeland, but to her mother and sisters, who were married to the King before her and, she hopes, are still alive somewhere in the Palace made of bone and metal. When Lufeng arrives at the Palace in advance of the wedding, she finds herself with freedom that doesn’t feel like freedom, roaming a place that sickens her with the death implicit in its construction, strange with the customs of the Land Wanderers. But to free her people from the threat of constant expansion, Lufeng will stay and marry—because she plans to use this opportunity to kill the King.
I’m consistently in awe of the strange and wonderful-terrible worlds Ai Jiang creates and the lovely whimsy she infuses them with, and Palace is no exception. With its push-pull between nature and technological advancement, duty and what you think is right, it’s easy to see the influence of Princess Mononoke in this fresh science fantasy take. One of the things I’ve come to expect and love in Jiang’s work is the themes of loss of cultural identity and thinking outside the place you were told was yours in order to defeat the machinery whose path you’ve been planted in. This certainly comes into play in Palace as Lufeng lays her plans to find the mother and sisters she’s been told are dead and to kill the King who wants to overrun her homeland. But of course, as I’ve also come to love from Jiang, some things are not at all what they seem.
I loved this one, and give it a strong recommend for those looking for a new take on Princess Mononoke, with Jiang’s fabulously complicated world-building and beautiful, insightful prose at its center.
Information about A Palace Near the Wind:
Author: Ai Jiang
Publisher: Titan Books
Release Date: April 15th, 2025
Print Length: 192 pages
Order from Bookshop.org.
