Zodiac Rising by Katie Zhao: Review by Colleen Mondor
Zodiac Rising, Katie Zhao (Random House 978-0-593-64641-0, $19.99, 416pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Deb JJ Lee.
Author Katie Zhao opens her young adult fantasy thriller Zodiac Rising with a brief prologue explaining the history behind 12 Chinese warriors, based on the zodiac calendar, who were summoned centuries ago in response to a royal plea to battle monsters known as Wrathlings. Their lineage brought peace to the land until foreigners arrived in 1860, during the Second Opium War, and British soldiers stole precious art including five bronze zodiac fountainheads causing a curse to be brought down on the capital-D Descendants. Those that remain are supernatural, but not magical or mighty. In short order, Zhao introduces one of them living in the modern day, a vampire named Julius, who immediately dies in a secret confrontation to recover the fountainheads. The plot then takes off as his sister and other Descendants seek to find his killer and recover the statues. Of course, all is not as it seems in their world, and thus the plot is filled with secrets, lies, bickering, and no small degree of teen angst.
From reading the early chapters, the primary source of that angst is that even though the Descendants have been alive for over 150 years, they still had to attend school at the private Earthly Branches Academy, which has left them all inordinately frustrated. While it follows an established line where aged characters continue to live and learn as teenagers, keeping the Descendants in high school is one of the aspects of the book that seemed most like a plot convenience, in this case to place the characters in the popular dark academia setting. Readers will need to set that question aside, though, and as the Descendants seek out to free themselves once and for all from the curse.
On the one hand, Zodiac Rising is a heist novel about trying to figure out where the fountainheads are and how to steal them back. It’s also a murder mystery to uncover Julius’s killer and enact some vengeance; his sister Evangeline is especially focused on that goal. In her case, there is also a personal calling to be a bit of a jerk to everyone who is not both a Descendant and a rich supernatural being. This makes her tough to like and her alliance with Alice, a mortal human Descendant, somewhat complicated.
Zhao uses shifting chapter points of view in the novel, spending most of her time with the core group trying to uncover all the plots: Evangeline, Alice, Tristan (werewolf), and Nicholas (shapeshifter). This works well, as the characters are a strong part of Zodiac Rising, even the unlikable ones. (Evangeline is not the only one.) For me, the narrative struggles with too much explaining however, and often new characters appear merely to force the primary four to think something through or explain themselves. Also, aside from the general zodiac warrior history in the prologue, I had questions about what they heroically did exactly, who the Descendants answer to now, and why they left China for Manhattan. It takes a long time for Zhao to get to those explanations, and in some cases it never happens, resulting in plot holes. The inner monologues get a bit frustrating as well making the well-written action, when it arrives, most welcome. There is a great twist near the end that set things up for future installments. One interesting note: In her Acknowledgements, the author mentions how she came to discover the actual 1860 art theft. Readers might want to look into that after reading her fantasy spin on subsequent events.
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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.
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