[Review] Descendant of the Crane by Joan He

Descendant of the Crane by Joan He

Rating: 4.5 stars

Published: April 9th 2019

Goodreads Synopsis:

Tyrants cut out hearts. Rulers sacrifice their own.
Princess Hesina of Yan has always been eager to shirk the responsibilities of the crown, but when her beloved father is murdered, she’s thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father’s killer, Hesina does something desperate: she engages the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death... because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago.
Using the information illicitly provided by the sooth, and uncertain if she can trust even her family, Hesina turns to Akira—a brilliant investigator who’s also a convicted criminal with secrets of his own. With the future of her kingdom at stake, can Hesina find justice for her father? Or will the cost be too high?

This was actually wonderful. A courtroom drama that gave me Death Note vibes.

Hesina, now the Queen of Yan following her father's death, seeks to avenge the late king by seeking out his murderer. However, she slowly realizes that she might not like the answer the closer she is to the truth. She is accompanied by her loyal family - Lilian and Caiyan, her adopted siblings (Caiyan is actually her advisor), and Sanjing, her younger brother and general to the country's army. She is told by a soothsayer to seek the help of an imprisoned criminal who is more than what he seems - Akira. She pardons him, and he becomes her representative in a trial in search for the truth.


What I loved about this was how tension was interplayed with drama, because you never knew who to suspect in this! Everyone (and I mean everyone) had the potential to be the killer. But even uncovering the truth about the murder creates a butterfly effect towards uncovering every other little secret, and those secrets are more than what they seem to be.

I almost thought Hesina's quest to be a bit like Oedipus's, though certainly not to any incestuous degree. This pursuit of the truth defines her character - blinds her, even, to what is happening around her, making this story all the more enthralling. Each character is viewed through Hesina's eyes, and her naïveté casts them oftentimes in a mistakenly good light.

Hesina herself does not even view herself as apt for queendom or much else, but it is this honesty that makes her so compelling.

"What is destiny?" she wondered, half to herself.
Akira, the master of saying random things, wasn't perturbed. "When you're really good at something."
Hesina hadn't thought about it that way. Now that she did, it was depressing. She wasn't good at much. A long, long time ago, she thought she had a knack for acting. She took to lying, and she preferred living in someone else's skin as opposed to her own. But nothing squelched childish dreams quite like inheriting the throne. Learning to rule was an all-consuming pastime.  - p. 101

Once, she envied Caiyan's intelligence. Theory came to him easily. So did reading massive tomes and calculating impossible sums on the abacus. But it was hard to be envious of someone who learned for the love of learning, and she admired Caiyan for always admitting ignorance whenever admission was due. She still struggled with that. p. 264

Joan He does a great job of making such mesmerizing characters and keeping us so caught up in the whodunit that we may miss the sleight of hand happening underfoot. The characters were so rich and so vivid, evoking the dimensionality that I desire in novels I read. I felt as though I knew each of them. I loved Sanjing's devotion to Mei and to Hesina, his jealousy of Caiyan. I loved Caiyan's subtleties and Lilian's lighthearted nature - both conveying their abilities to understand court politics.

And Akira! Who was basically L. I wished there was more of him. There was so much of Hesina and her family that we did not get Akira and his story up until the end. He appears in snippets and to deliver the rightful judgment in the trials, with his cleverness, but I wanted to see more of that sizzling, forbidden romance that was starting to develop between him and Hesina.

Plus, the writing has a great balance of being poetic and embodying of its characters.

Hesina thought of all the ways stories could be conveyed. Inked on flesh. Sewn on silk facades. She thought of her father, beheading the relic emperor. Purging the sooths. An era drawn from blood. A throne erected upon bones. - p. 324

That being said, there were points when this story moved at a snail-like pace in the very beginning, with Akira defending each person wrongly accused. It is only until the middle-end that we pick up pace, reveal after reveal after reveal. Yet, I was captivated by the story to the very end. I want there to be a sequel, because there's so much! That still needs to be resolved!

I sure hope there's a sequel.