A Palace Near The Wind by Ai Jiang

One of these days, I’ll like a piece by Ai Jiang, but today is not that day.

I’m just so baffled by her writing, and in a way that doesn’t even make me want to lay the blame at her feet necessarily. This is actually one of the few, perhaps only, times that I’ve questioned the professional choices of a Titan editor, because (for a start) what is with the weird ass grammar in this? Maybe it’s just an effect of having an ARC — or maybe it’s an effect of the current allergy in genre writing towards the perfect tenses — but I was two pages in and already wanted to bring out the red pen to fix the most glaring errors.

Thankfully, the grammar gets less glaringly bad as the book progresses, which is one small mercy. Another is that the premise of this first novella in a duology remains as interesting as when I originally said yes to it. Our main character Lufeng is the Eldest Daughter of the Feng people. One by one, her mother and sisters have left their forests to marry into the Palace, as the realm of the Land Wanderers is known. The Palace is constantly encroaching on the Feng woods, uprooting plant life and sending the indigenous Feng away in search of a better life, often into the heart of the Palace itself (or something: the details are vague.)

Now it’s Lufeng’s turn to leave the forests and marry the King. She’s determined to find her family and bring them safely home. If she has to kill the king in order to do that, then so be it. But the more time she spends at the Palace, the more secrets she uncovers about what’s really going on between the Palace and Feng. Will she be able to save her family? Will they even want to be saved?

So let’s talk about the glaringly obvious issue with this novella (now that I’m done clutching my pearls over the distressingly bad grammar of the first few pages): this should be a novel. It’s not complete unto itself as, for example, Nghi Vo’s terrific novellas are. While the generous part of me would be inclined to say that more pages would help the author figure out things like pacing and character development and maybe actually writing a story that makes sense instead of stringing a bunch of scenes together and hoping for the best… well, maybe I should be grateful that this was tidied into less than 200 pages after all.

The world building is exciting: the different peoples/nations are all tied, so far as I can tell, to the four classical Greek elements, with a mysterious other location at the heart of it all. Lol, that was not a gratuitous Captain Planet joke when I wrote it but it certainly is now.

Anyway, I love the idea of a princess out of water, forced into a union that she doesn’t want but determined to gain freedom for her people. I was also impressed at the twist regarding the marriage itself. I can even forgive Lufeng’s poor choices because, well, she’s a sheltered princess who definitely wasn’t prepared for all the lies and scheming she’d encounter.

But it’s harder to sympathize with someone who rants about how some Feng people are turning their backs on their culture with one breath before claiming that what she really wants is for people to be able to choose in the next. The main character has zero self-awareness in a way that leads me to believe that the author doesn’t either (especially on the heels of the incredibly annoying I AM AI.) She just plunges from one unlikely set piece to the next, with tons of deus ex machina and only the bare minimum of self-reflection. Here’s the thing: you can only be a bratty anti-hero if you’re fully cognizant that that’s what you’re being. Are editors just not checking their writers on nonsense like this any more? Nearly every behind-the-scenes person in the publishing industry is wildly underpaid, but come on.

This is one of those books that would’ve super benefited from tough but fair beta reads. The narrative is disjointed, as so much of the book — including and especially the main character — is underdeveloped in a way that’s borderline insulting to the readers’ intelligence. Maybe it gets better in Book Two, but I likely won’t waste my time finding out.

A Palace Near The Wind by Ai Jiang was published April 15 2025 by Titan Books and is available from all good booksellers, including