Synopsis (From Goodreads)
A combat warrior will risk everything to awaken the dragons and save her kingdom in Jillian Boehme’s epic YA Fantasy debut, Stormrise, inspired by Twelfth Night and perfect for fans of Tamora Pierce.
If Rain weren’t a girl, she would be respected as a Neshu combat master. Instead, her gender dooms her to a colorless future. When an army of nomads invades her kingdom, and a draft forces every household to send one man to fight, Rain takes her chance to seize the life she wants.
Knowing she’ll be killed if she’s discovered, Rain purchases powder made from dragon magic that enables her to disguise herself as a boy. Then she hurries to the war camps, where she excels in her training—and wrestles with the voice that has taken shape inside her head. The voice of a dragon she never truly believed existed.
As war looms and Rain is enlisted into an elite, secret unit tasked with rescuing the High King, she begins to realize this dragon tincture may hold the key to her kingdom’s victory. For the dragons that once guarded her land have slumbered for centuries . . . and someone must awaken them to fight once more.
My Review
4 out of 5 stars
To put it simply, this is a straight-up retelling of Mulan. Rain has to disguise herself as her mentally-handicapped brother, Storm, in order to save both him and her father from serving in the war. To aid in her disguise, she purchases some dragon powder from a local shady medicine lady that stops her menstrual cycle and also has a side effect of making her voice slightly deeper and her hearing a dragon speak to her in her dreams. While off training and fighting with the army, she ends up falling for one of the recruits, but obviously has to hide her identity from him. It is a retelling that is focused more on the warrior aspect and not the romance, but the most famous adaption of Mulan, the Disney animation, is also fairly romance-light. The main difference in this Mulan is the dragon aspect (though Mushu is a thing in the Disney animation, so…), which was fairly light. The actual dragon doesn’t make an appearance until close to the end of the book, and it’s not like she is constantly receiving guidance from the dragon throughout the rest of the book.
Despite that, this book was just very quick and simple to read, and at the time, it was exactly what I needed. It’s not super description-heavy, so while it may be hard to picture the author’s vision of the world, you can also just picture it however you’d like. I also think I would have adored this book if I read it as an early teen. One of my favorite troupes has always been a girl disguising herself as a boy, which I believe I can blame on from Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series, and this book would make a pretty good recommendation to any young girl who really loved those books.
See this review on Goodreads.
Mad Scibrarian 