I was leery about the premise behind this novel when I first heard about but hey if people like a genderbent version of the Chinese classic Water Margin, why not? Then it was a finalist for the Nebula Award and was recommended by a bunch of critics, so I thought I should give it a shot. Specifically I was curious about web fiction not being widely recognized and wondered how a properly published book lauded by mainstream critics would match up. My verdict is not well at all. It’s an entertaining action-adventure that can be sometimes quite amusing but I wouldn’t consider it a deep book or even good writing.

Despite being a woman, Lin Chong has risen to the position of master arms instructor for the Imperial Guard through sheer grit after decades of hard work. In her spare time, she also teaches self-defense classes to women. During one such session, her friend Lu Junyi introduces her to a new student Lu Da. The two are complete opposites. The former is a wealthy, unmarried socialite who organizes salons for intellectuals. The latter is a brutish fighter who was expelled by an order of monks for lack of discipline. Lu Da possesses a rare God’s Tooth that she can tap into to increase her strength, which makes her overconfident. Lin Chong defeats her in a duel to demonstrate the superiority of skill and control. Afterwards Lin Chong decides to accompany Lu Junyi to a meeting with her own superior Marshall Gao Qiu to protect her. Nothing happens during the meeting itself but afterwards Gao Qiu tries to sexually assault Lin Chong. When she resists, she is arrested and condemned to a penal colony. Gao Qiu arranges for her to be killed by guards enroute but Lu Da intervenes, having being asked by Lu Junyi to watch out for her. This is how Lin Chong joins the bandits of Liangshan, criminals and outlaws who have fled from the oppressive and patriarchal regime of the Northern Song Dynasty.

As author S.L. Huang states in the foreword, this is very much just an adaptation of Water Margin with genderbent characters presented as a glorious action adventure. While it follows the broad outlines of the Chinese classic, it’s heavily condensed, focusing on the personal story of Lin Chong and generally has a more positive spin on the events. Since this is written by an American and explicitly sets out to champion women, Western moral values apply here. The author takes care to warn readers about the brutality of the contents and that the bandits of Liangshan aren’t nice people but anyone who’s familiar with the source material will be aware of how toned down this version is. I understand that as a work of escapist fantasy, this has little need to be realistic but I still find the scenario exceptionally implausible in the context of ancient China. For example the characters include multiple unmarried wealthy women who are able to maintain their independence and freedom of action and no explanation of the source of their wealth. The heroes of Liangshan consist pretty much entirely of women, with even the few men being crossdressers. There seems to be no need for this apart from ‘because I can’. Even if the community was founded and is led by women, why wouldn’t men gravitate there to escape from the government? I also note that while this book is celebrated in both feminist and LGBT circles, it has pretty much zero romance in it. There’re hints that two of the women are lovers but there’s no on-screen affection whatsoever.

It works decently as an action adventure with plenty of detailed fight scenes and even wuxia and magical feats. There are also some satisfying stratagems on the part of their tactician Wu Yong though the best plan here of robbing valuables being transported for a high official’s birthday is lifted straight from the original book. One annoyance I had is with the author’s choice of terminology when translating words and concepts from Chinese. Where other writers directly employ terms like qi, she chooses literal English words like energy instead. She also uses the term scholar’s skills for supernatural and possibly superhuman arts. I feel that this is reinventing the wheel and ignoring the large body of existing work that transliterates Chinese wuxia to English. I also dislike the lack of imagination in expressing raw power in terms of pure explosive force rather than something more conceptually interesting. In general, the inspirations this book draws from are obvious: running on water, manipulation of clouds of matter very similarly to Avatar: The Last Airbender and so on. I detect little originality in this work.

Some critics wrote about liking the development of the characters. I preferred the book at the beginning before Lin Chong joined the Liangshan bandits. The text goes into her motivations, conflicted feelings over the empire and some memories of her life including the fact that she’s had children without any mention of who the father was. Once she gets to Liangshan however, the pace goes into overdrive as the book has to cover many more characters and rush towards an ending. Huang feels free to jump into the perspective of any character she needs to complete her story, never mind how little development they’d received before that. This results in a palpable drop in the quality of the writing and the sophistication of the characters’ motivations. I was particularly irked by how the relationship between Lin Chong and Lu Junyi later develops. The author effectively puts the two friends at odds by contriving for them to not be able to communicate with one another. In general, most of the dialogue that happens in this book are very shallow. The characters talk around each other and never dare to broach the serious topics directly. I suspect that the author believes this better represents Asian social dynamics but the novel is just too short to let this play out to proper effect.

It’s not terrible book. It’s readable, decently entertaining at times, and likely Westerners who have had no prior exposure to the Water Margin would get more of a kick out of it. But many of my favorite webfiction works are many times better and even those that aren’t written by ethnic Chinese at all evince much more of a grasp of Asian philosophy than this book demonstrates. I suspect its success is a matter of right time, right place and perhaps even some Hollywood connections. S.L. is after all a stuntwoman and martial artist who has taught actors. These mainstream published books may still have more prestige than webfiction that is put online for anyone to read for free but I no longer believe that this means they are necessarily better.