Accompanying her salesman father on a business trip, college student Brenda Morris discovers that he's one of the Thirteen Orphans, exiled from their otherworldly Chinese homeland for their support of a fallen emperor. They've lived on Earth in peace for three generations, but now someone is hunting them down. When her father falls a victim, Brenda must join forces with the other Orphans to save him and them.
I'm not sure how to describe this book. I read it in a day and am interested to discover what transpires in the sequel, but that's possibly because nothing much really happens in this installment. Our main characters are introduced, of course, and while I find them reasonably sympathetic, there's something slightly ... overbroad? caricaturish? ... about them and their interactions. This might have something to do with the co-point of view character, Brenda, being a callow and sheltered south-eastern American white girl tossed off the deep end into a Foreign Environment (a Chinese-derived magical heritage via California and the Southwest). She (and we) are on the receiving end of lots and lots and lots of exposition; the action, particularly the few encounters between the protagonists and their mysterious antagonists, intersperse the set-up rather than the other way around. I do like seeing a non-western floorplan for this adventure and am kind of intrigued by the ways Lindskold has the various Orphans, all descendants of the original thirteen, deal with their inheritance as a result of the various tacks their fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers took in the process of assimilating to American culture. Still, if the plot doesn't pick up steam in Nine Gates, I'll probably drop this series.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
