The publisher promotes ‘Ebony Gate‘ as “a female John Wick story with dragon magic set in contemporary San Francisco’s Chinatown.” which I should have taken as a warning. The John Wick movies look nice, they’re packed with action scenes that escalate as the movie progresses and, after a fairly short time, they bore me because the violence is all there is to the plot.

‘Ebony Gate’ was more inventive and entertaining than the John Wick movies but the action was equally relentless and ultimately, equally uninteresting.

I enjoyed the combination of modern San Francisco with South East Asian magic systems.

I was fascinated by the idea of a diaspora of Lóng Jiārén, the descendants of the eight sons of the Dragon and heir to their powers, living amongst humans across the world in talent-based Clans, competing to increase their hoard of magical artefacts from their fractured home world. Discovering how Jiārén culture worked and how they used their Talents kept me curious and entertained.

The ‘You have 48 hours to save San Franciso by finding and restoring the Ebony Gate that closes a portal to the underworld‘ was epic quest material.

Given all that, I’d expected to be writing a gushing review saying how much fun this was and how much I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Unfortunately, as the book got into its stride, I began to part company with it. I never got to the point where I wanted to set the book aside but I had a growing feeling that something was missing.

The storytelling felt mechanical. I was being moved from one display of magic to the next without gaining any momentum or engagement. I was reminded of that point I seem to reach in every Avengers movie where the CGI goes on for so long that I disengage from it emotionally even though I admire the quality of the production standards. I loved the magic and the fights but I couldn’t get traction with the characters.

Emiko, our heroine, didn’t work for me. She had a great traumatic backstory that was slowly and cleverly revealed. She had some witty lines and she gives great angst but I didn’t believe in her. She’s in her late twenties, she spent years as an enforcer for her Clan, using her blade to kill and maim without mercy and on a scale that eventually earned her the title of The Butcher of Beijing yet she often behaves in a way that suggests that in terms of judgement and emotional stability, she’s stuck in late adolescence.

The ending of the book was also a little strange. I’d expected the climax to be the end of the battle that the whole book had been building up to. Instead, the final chapters were an attempt to re-establish some normalcy by having Emiko take her charismatic, already-save-my-life-once, knows-more-about-my-culture-than-a-human-should, not-my-boyfriend- honest, tall, fit, good looking billionaire to dinner with the only human couple she has any kind of relationship with. It seemed an odd decision unless it was meant to set up the next book. A pessimistic voice in my head was going, ‘Please don’t let there be a love triangle between Emiko, the not-my-boyfriend billionaire and the used-to-be-my-boyfriend Jiārén white tiger.’

So, ‘Ebony Gate’ kept me entertained but it also left me feeling slightly dissatisfied.

I’m going to wait to see a summary of the plot of the next book before I decide whether to continue with this trilogy.