This novella was quite disappointing. It felt like the author wasn't used to writer shorter novel: it didn't have the right pacing, structure and focus for a novella. It was full of useless repetitions that made the writing feel clunky and bland, and every thought, emotion, intention and plot point was painfully spelled out. The plot was a bit farfetched and incoherent, relying on plot twists instead of an actual story, and full of contradictions and plot holes. The concept was interesting but the execution doesn't do it any justice; it really wants to "Say Something" but whatever message there supposedly was ended up being swallowed by a lot of unnecessary details and poor character and plot development. The characters were very one-dimensional and their personality changed from one chapter to the other just to suit the next plot twist, which rendered the politics and dynamics of the world completely meaningless. This read like a 2009 dystopian ya.

It's not easy to write from the point of view of the 'other' - someone so fundamentally different in terms of body, mind, upbringing and perception that there is virtually no overlap between their world and yours. That and the fact that there were pretty creative bits of world-building here and there made me give the story the benefit of the doubt, even though I was not initially impressed by the pacing or taken in by the alien setting that I personally struggled to comprehend and imagine.

I'm sorry to say it got worse: the melancholy and slow beginning I could almost get on board with, provided a decent development, but from there on it was always either pure confusion or plot twists that came from absolutely nowhere.

SPOILERS: From a mental note that wearing shoes felt wrong and unnatural to the main character we go to "I haven't even noticed I put them on" - was there a time skip when she got used to those? There must've been, but you won't really be able to tell from the text. From "the Palace destroys the natural world to develop technology" we go to "actually, there is a place called Gear and Engine that is much more technologically advanced" - so much so, apparently, that no one in the main character's land heard of it or what? From "the King is pure evil and I need to kill him" we go to "btw the King is your dad, there are more powerful puppet masters and incidentally one of them is the tailor you went to in the market and who incidentally gave you pictures of your mother and siblings that helped you locate them" to "also your Gran is 4,000 years old and created your race from scratch" - what, why, how come, but more importantly, what on earth is this all even for?/END SPOILERS

The main character reaches world-shattering conclusions in leaps and bounds and often without any reasonable basis whatsoever, while the plot bounces around like a self-propelled yo-yo in a fairly large room, never hitting spots that are near enough to create a semblance of cohesions. No one's motivations make much sense, and the 2D characterization verges on painful. I did not initially notice this, but as there were fewer and fewer pages left and most things remained unresolved, it became clear that this is a set up for a series - which honestly might've benefited from being books rather than novellas.

2.5 rounded up to 3.

I like what the author tried to do here - the nature people are interesting, and I liked the conflict with the more technological and modern people. It was a good commentary on industrialization and it's effects on nature.
What I missed was an emotional connection to the story and main character. Sadly everything felt a bit flat, and I struggled with finishing it. Still, a good read and I will be on the lookout for future stuff the author writes!

I really liked the atmosphere and the beautiful writing style. I liked the different kinds of "people" and the hints at the other city that we will probably explore in the next installment. I thought some things were a bit too dreamy for my personal liking but I still appreciated the book as a whole.

I requested this book because I was intrigued by the cover and the fairy tale-like premise. In A Palace Near the Wind, the eldest princess of treelike nature spirits is bartered to a human king in exchange for delaying the destruction of her kingdom. But as Lufeng explores the palace, she begins to learn more about the fate of the sisters who preceded her--and to realize that Palace is very different from what she expected...

This novella executes in interesting genre blend through its unreliable narrator. From Lufeng's perspective, we get a dark, Bluebeard-like fairy tale with palaces and marriages to the king. But beneath her ignorance, we get glimpses of a world much more grittily SF than fantasy, set in a heavily industrialized country with business deals, worker revolts, and comscreens. However, the worldbuilding also tends towards capitalized proper nouns that are the bane of second rate fantasy novels--Tasker, Walker, The Word Searcher, The Healer. I was also put off by the near allegorical simplicity of the plot, with Lufeng as the sacrifice of nature to halt the path of evil development. The prose tends towards awkwardly over-ornate to the extent of obscuring meaning at times. Take this sentence from early in Lufeng's time in the Palace as an example: "The fourth photograph held images of someone I knew not, someone with barked skin unsmooth, dark needle threads hanging from their limbs were woven."

Lufeng herself is the only character given much depth beyond the archetypal simplicity of servant or baby sister. While her desire to free her family is relatable, she has few strong characteristics aside from hatred of Palace and loyalty to her people's culture. I was also surprised by the decision to have her spurn animal meat and products as if they were a type of cannibalism. The Feng kingdom is meant to be a realm of creatures particularly in touch with nature, and the total disgust with the concept of predation seems to be disconnected from that. This choice seemed to be out of step with the thematic messaging of nature resisting industry.

An interesting blend of genres, but I found the plot and characters to be rather flat.

I was so very excited for this one! The cover is gorgeous, the description is intriguing and the comps are just SO good. Princess Mononoke is one of my favourite films, after all.
First things first: While there are definitely similarities in theme, this does not come close to Mononoke. It doesn't have to, either. It's nature vs. technology, tradition vs. alleged progress, indigineous people vs. colonizing force.
I really liked Ai Jiang's writing. She writes beautifully, lushly and clearly enjoys playing with words and structures. It was a joy to read. I also liked the world this story is set in and especially how different the peoples are, with our protagonist's people having bark skin, for example.

I do feel like there was a little too much of some things and too little of other things, though.
The writing is beautiful, but also very dense and at times I couldn't really picture what she was describing because the prose got a little too flowery and convoluting. The world building is well done, but the world is simply too big for a short novella, so a lot of it lacks complexity. The characters are, on paper, interesting, especially Lufeng. But there is very little time to actually get to know them so I never really warmed up to any of them and didn't care much for the emotional beats pertaining to them. I think this story would have been so, so much better as a full length novel, with more time spent on developing the world and the characters. The plot also moves at breakneck speed at times because of the format and it felt lacking, empty even.

It's still a beautifully written book with a great setting and interesting premise, I just genuinely think the novella length did it a great disservice. There's too much and at the same time too little to really turn this into more than a three star read - but those three stars are well-deserved.

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♟️Rating:2/5⭐
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Thank you, NetGalley, for providing a free ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book brought me into a Lorax rabbit hole because of how much it reminded me of that movie. To be fair, I do not have the strongest recollection of that movie since I did not particularly like it. But thanks to this book, I found out about Onceler’s deleted song (aka Biggering), which turns out to be an absolute bop and challenged my perspective on the Lorax movie. However, unlike the Lorax movie, this book does not have any catchy songs or the Onceler to save it.

To start off, this book lacks any nuances, and the message or theme of this book is constantly being hammered down to its readers. A lot of the character’s agendas were ‘black and white’ with their motivations either being super vague or right up slapped into your face. (Mainly being, humans are bad, and we need to save the earth.) We’re constantly being told how the land wanderers were more superior as compared to the people from Feng due to their technological advancements as such. In the beginning of the story, the info-dumping is akin to the grace of a reversing dump truck. And despite all of this info-dumping, the themes mentioned were only touched upon superficially and not as in-depth as I would have liked. I might have preferred it if the novel actually dove deeper into capitalism and exploitations of organisms for unethical experiments, which are still relevant in today’s world. Except we got a Disney villain or the Onceler’s long-lost twin instead. The novel really tried to be too many things at once but ended up not being able to settle on a single thing.

The pacing was also kind of weird (it does not help with the indo-dumping) as it started off kind of slow before taking off at a breakneck pace with a lot of abrupt turning points. A lot of the scenes were skipped over or rushed through, leaving lots of questions unanswered as well as plot holes. The pacing came at the cost of Lufeng’s character arc and her leaps of logic, which are so absurd that it actually turned out to be true. Even though this is a novella, I still do expect a solid storyline arc where I can trace it back easily. Halfway through, I almost forgot that Lufeng wanted to take revenge on the king as well as the land wanderers because she forgot about it as well. I struggled to connect with any of the characters since all of them were like, “Oh wait, you thought they were on your side? Turns out they are not!!” and the reveal is often done in an almost cartoonish style. Also, Lufeng was doing nothing the whole time even though she was mainly left alone in the palace waiting for answers to sprout before her.

I think the world-building of this novel is overly ambitious as well. I constantly struggled trying to visualise the world since some people who I thought were humans actually turned out to not be humans, and they all seem to have humanistic qualities but are actually not humans. You can see where I’m going with this. Despite the info-dumping, we never really get to see the various abilities or how the machines work. The ideas (I would admit) are pretty original, and I would love to see more new ideas, but I feel like more time should be given for the author to carefully plan out this novella.

Overall, I was expecting something like ‘biggering’ from the Lorax. (Why is this song actually so good?) However, just like biggering, it was scrapped off the final version, and instead we got ‘How Bad Can I Be Instead’. Great idea but it is overly ambitious, and the execution is poor. Perhaps this book could have been a better read if it had been written as a novel instead or written in the future when the author has more experience with writing.

Interesting steampunk vs. nature concept, but I did not find it compelling enough to recommend. This is, in theory, a short read, but the pace was halting.

Thank you Netgalley for an e-book ARC copy of this sci-fi novella. I buddy read this with Mai, Zana, and Steph and I’m so glad we were able to discuss it together because I’m not going to lie, I was a little lost for most of this book.

The book takes place in a fictional sci-fi world where tree people called “Wind Walkers” (I still never quite got down what they looked like) are negotiating saving their land by bargaining with giving the palace new brides. The main character Liu Lufeng is the eldest daughter and has to leave her homeland for the sterile and cold tiles of the palace to marry the human king.

This book was beautiful and peak sci-fi and it was very unique world building. However, I found it difficult to understand what was going on which made the reading arduous at times. Since this is a duology I’m hoping a lot of my questions left unanswered will be clarified in the second book. Either way, I plan to read the second book and I plan on reading everything Ai Jiang writes. She is a talented up and coming writer and writes compelling stories.

The short review of this book is that it would be a much better story if it were longer! The premise and writing are excellent, but the development of both the plot and the characters begs for more which is so upsetting because you can FEEL how good it would be if it were longer!

While I loved Ai Jiang's other work, this one unfortunately fell short for me. The world is beautiful and the plot intriguing. However, it lacked heart, which wasn't the case when I read her other books. I struggled to get through this one, though I finished it.

The beautiful cover caught me attention but I said for the elegant prose. This authors describes setting so well!

For fans of Princess Mononoke. Magical world building and a moving story packed into a tiny novella.
For fans of T Kingfisher and Nghi Vo.

Liu Lufeng is the eldest princess of the Feng royalty, people who live in the clouds and are known as Winwalkers. She is the next bride, the next sacrifice, to the human king following her sisters and mother.
This wedding gives her people more time to stop the expansion of the humans so that the Feng can keep their lands, people, and culture intact from the crass and cruel Land Wanderers.

Lufeng desperate to return home, to save her mother and sisters, to kill the King if she has to. This is a story about having to learn, unlearn, and relearn everything you think you know. A repositioning of your world view.

The world was rich (bark people, wind talking), however I think too much was packed in and this failed to deliver a coherent, well-rounded story.
it felt too-overcrowded. A full-length novel would struggle to unpack the magic, culture, politics, history of the world that is only hinted at.

The characters did feel slightly flat, but with such a short page count, this is to be expected. However, I did feel empathy for Lufeng and recognised her emotional response and sense of duty and obligations.

A peak into an imaginative mind. I felt satisfied and whisked away by this story but needed more.

Physical arc gifted by Titan books.

OK, I have mixed feelings about this book... I really liked the premise and the beginning! I loved the whole theme of nature VS technology that appeared on the first half.
However, I found it a bit rushed. I couldn’t engage with the characters much and while the setting was beautiful, I felt we didn't get to explore as much as we needed.
Overall, not a bad book though!

I couldn’t understand this at all - I couldn’t picture these tree people and it stunted my enjoyment of the story. I couldn’t make it make sense in my head. I’m sorry - it’s definitely a book that others will love, but it’s not for me.

The description and cover for this book caught my eye and I wanted to give this author a try. I got about 31% in and couldn’t keep going. It found the main characters to be unappealing. She doesn’t seem to have much agency in the book and there is quite a bit of doing as she was told and never questioning it. I found that I couldn’t connect with her and the driving force of the story wasn’t compelling enough for me to keep going.

Ai Jiang once again has shown why she is one of the best new voices in literature with her new novel A Palace Near The Wind. Lefung is due to marry the king as tradition of the Feng people in order to keep the peace and balance of their land. As she prepares to wed the King she learns that her people (the Feng people) will never truly be safe from the humans and she must let go of the traditions she holds dearly in order to save herself and her family.

This is the first novella in a sci-fantasy doulogy by Ai Jiang.
Wind Walkers are tree-like creatures that have the ability to command the wind. The main character, Lufeng is the next in line to marry the king as part of a treaty between her people and their human rulers.
I’m enthralled by Jiang’s world building and story telling.. There is an ambiguity in this tale that may be frustrating for some. I personally enjoyed the journey and I’m excited for where the next book will lead!

Thank you to NetGalley and Titan for the eARC!

Of the three stories by Ai Jiang that I’ve read so far– “I am AI” and “Linghun” are the two others–this was, unfortunately, by far my least favorite. “Linghun” was my favorite, the most well-balanced between premise and execution; “I am AI” was more ambitious, but still fairly satisfying. A PALACE NEAR THE WIND, which is much more fantasy than the other two, is probably the most ambitious, but lacking in crucial world-building elements that would have dispelled my confusion and enabled me to be more invested in the story.

Reading A PALACE NEAR THE WIND felt like looking at a painting that lingered too much on certain pretty details while forgetting to sketch out the crucial outline that the audience needs in order to contextualize what’s going on. Lufeng was much more interested in describing the wonders of the palace in which she is held (hostage? I am unclear) as well as the market in which she comes in contact with human (?) goods for the first time. I found some of her thoughts interesting and reminiscent of A Memory Called Empire’s MC’s struggles over liking certain aspects of her colonizer’s culture while also acknowledging the precariousness of her position in her colonizer’s eyes.

BUT WAIT! Who is human and who is not? Why does she feel like the palace is a prison? (Is it a prison?) I pictured the Wind Walkers as sapient tree creatures, and I am guessing that the inhabitants of Gear and Engine (the evil colonizers?) are human, but this is totally a guess as I feel it was never clearly explained. I THINK that this story could be an allegory for indigenous cultures being exploited by human populations for profit, but there are also biological experimentation, and community traitors, and family drama, and cartoonish villains, confusingly dramatic chase scenes that ended abruptly and successfully, and more.

I think there is the potential for a rich and compelling story, but unfortunately I feel like it is buried by authorial choices that I don’t understand. I wanted fewer pretty descriptions of markets and fabrics, and more explanation about the political (?) situation between the Wind Walkers and the… other people. Fewer twists, fewer secondary characters with questionable usefulness, and more about the history of what would compel the main characters to make the decisions they made.

Sadly, A PALACE NEAR THE WIND failed to meet my expectations due to insufficient world-building and an under-explained main conflict, which meant that I unfortunately was not able to emotionally invest in the story and the characters’ fates.

DNF at 62%

Everything else is falling secondary to the setting. Although I like the descriptions, it's making for a slow and boring tale. I've decided to choose peace and not continue.