Road to Ruin by Hana LeeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
If I was pitching this book as a Hollywood movie, I would sum it up thusly: Mad Max: Fury Road with dinosaurs and magic.
There are differences in the setting. It might be Earth, and it might not, but either way we have a post-apocalyptic wasteland; ancient, forgotten technology from the so-called "Road Builders"; scattered cities, called kerinas, struggling to survive, powered by a half-liquid, half-smoke magical substance called "mana"; our main characters able to draw on and utilize said mana for different uses; and one main character, the Princess Yi-Nereen, wishing to escape the fate of her kerina and reunite with her childhood friend Kadrin. For three years Yi-Nereen and Kadrin have been exchanging letters and gifts, brought to them by the courier Jin-Lu across the wasteland, and they have fallen in love (an unbeknownst to either, Jin-Lu is in love with both of them). Now, on the eve of her forced marriage to another, Yi-Nereen asks Jin to smuggle her out of Kerina Rut and take her to Kadrin's kerina.....and Jin-Lu says yes.
In this case, we have magebikes instead of war rigs, but I spotted the influence of the movie even before the author mentioned it in her acknowledgments. Which is okay: George Miller's masterpiece is a fine starting point, and the author certainly takes it in her own direction. The worldbuilding is a bit sparse--we never find out who the Road Builders were, or where mana comes from, or who made the aforementioned dinosaurs, which sound like they were genetically engineered to subsist on mana--but since this is the first of a series, presumably those questions will be dealt with further down the line.
In any event, if you're a fan of a Mad Max-like world, you could certainly do worse than reading this.
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