BOOKS | Review: Jade Fire Gold by June C.L. Tan

Name: Jade Fire Gold

Author: June C.L. Tan

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Date published: November 2024

Genre: Fiction, young adult, fantasy, adventure

Pages: 464

Rating: 3/5 

 

Her destiny. His revenge.
In an empire on the brink of war...
Ahn is no one, with no past and no family.
Altan is a lost heir, his future stolen away as a child.
When they meet, Altan sees in Ahn a path to reclaiming the throne. Ahn sees a way to finally unlock her past and understand her lethal magical abilities.
But they may have to pay a far deadlier price than either could have imagined.

- From Goodreads. 

This had a lot of potential and I did enjoy reading it, especially in the beginning, but I think I struggled with the pacing and the way the plot unfolded. There were a lot of plot threads that were only touched on briefly that I thought could have been explored more, but since this seems to be a stand-alone for now, we won't get to find out any more about them.

I did like our two main characters, but I felt Jin had a stronger personality and journey, while with Ahn I felt like the writing for her wasn't so certain and it felt like we needed more time to really understand who she was and what she wanted. It also felt like we spent a lot of time on the build up of the romance between them, for it not to really get anywhere, and I think the romance storyline could have been stronger, if the author had really committed to making this a really powerful love story between them, either that or made it two books and built up the friendship in the first book and focused on the romance in the second book.

The world-building had a lot of interesting elements, once again that I think would have been fascinating to explore more if there had been more time, it felt like there was a lot more depth to the world that we didn't get to see and that could have been intriguing to learn more about.

Overall, I think the premise and the ideas in the story were great, but it was a bit disappointing that the story didn't live up to its potential when it could have been really great if there had been more follow-through on the things it set up.