Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix is a gorgeous new spin on the tale of Snow White

Julie Dao’s Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix puts a whole new spin on an old tale, by giving us a take on Snow White with a fascinating heroine and a new cultural twist.

It’s not rare for YA novels to offer up new takes on stories we already know. How many times have we seen books which purport to bring us new versions of Beauty and the Beast or Sleeping Beauty? What is interesting, however, is when a book or series not only decides to do this, but does it well.

Such is the case with Julie Dao’s Rise of the Empress series, which retells the story of Snow White and the Evil Queen, but with a lot more complicated female characters, magic and a distinctly East Asian-inspired fantasy culture. In the mystical kingdom of Feng Lu, the Dragon Lord and the Serpent God battle for control of the entire realm, and a flawed woman has risen to power through dark and frightening means. Can an exiled princess put the kingdom to rights?

Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix is, technically, a sequel to Dao’s previous novel Forest of a Thousand Lanterns. However, the two books are read more as two sides of the same coin, rather than a straight sequel. Theoretically, you could read Blazing Phoenix without ever having opened Thousand Lanterns and still be pretty up to speed on what’s going on. They’re largely two separate stories even though multiple characters appear in, and affect, both of them.

If you’ve read the first installment, Blazing Phoenix is a much richer experience, since you’ll come into knowing a lot more about the kingdoms of Feng Lu, as week as several important figures like Kang, Shiro and Fu. (How you feel about the differences in the way Empress Xifeng is presented in both books is largely going to come down to whether you like her/care about her story or not. The shift in her depiction here is jarring, no matter how understandable it may be.)

But if you’ve never read a word of Dao’s work before, you’ll still find yourself charmed by Blazing Phoenix, its brave heroine and the gorgeous imagery used throughout the story.

Whereas Thousand Lanterns was an origin story for the Evil Queen, Blazing Phoenix is a story about Snow White. Known in this version as Jade, the princess who was raised in exile must still run for her life from her manipulative stepmother who wants nothing more than to see her dead. Therefore, the basic beats of the story are similar, in large part. But this novel goes above and beyond to give readers a fully realized heroine, with plenty of agency, power and strength of her own. As a character, Jade is a wonder: brave, caring, stubborn, and smart. Her story is about her search to understand and accept herself, and to learn what it takes to become the leader of the kingdom she loves.

Her task seems simple enough: Find five relics of the famous Dragon Lords and use them to summon a celestial army to help defeat Empress Xifeng and her gross snake soldiers. (Bonus: Defeating Xifeng also stops her from killing random women and eating their hearts in order to maintain her personal beauty and power.) The bulk of the story follows Jade’s journey to different kingdoms in search of these relics, and the puzzles she and her newfound group of friends must solve to retrieve them. In the traditional Snow White story, our heroine doesn’t necessarily get much control over her own destiny. Here, that’s definitely not the case, as Jade gets the chance to use her strength, smarts and inner determination to help shape her own life. She chooses her destiny, rather than is driven by it.

If you know the source material, you largely know how this will all turn out in the end, but the story is still far from boring. Dao’s gorgeous imagery and beautiful descriptions make the Great Forest and other kingdoms of Feng Lu come to life, the folklore-inspired tales that connect to each relic feel like magic, and the cast of secondary characters are deeply appealing. (I’d read a sequel novel about Wren, is what I’m saying.)

The novel’s final battle feels strangely anticlimactic, given the scope and scale of the events that occur. But it’s perhaps a testament to Dao’s ability as a writer that it’s the smaller, more human moments that really land – and what you’ll take away from this story, in the end.

Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix is now available wherever books are sold.