Green — (2009-2011) Publisher: She was born in poverty, in a dusty village under the equatorial sun. She does not remember her mother, she does not remember her own name — her earliest clear memory is of the day her father sold her to the tall pale man. In the Court of the Pomegranate Tree, where she was taught the ways of a courtesan… and the skills of an assassin… she was named Emerald, the precious jewel of the Undying Duke’s collection of beauties. She calls herself Green. The world she inhabits is one of political power and magic, where Gods meddle in the affairs of mortals.At the center of it is the immortal Duke’s city of Copper Downs, which controls all the trade on the Storm Sea. Green has made many enemies, and some secret friends, and she has become a very dangerous woman indeed. Acclaimed author Jay Lake has created a remarkable character in Green, and evokes a remarkable world in this novel. Green and her struggle tosurvive and find her own past will live in the reader’s mind for a long time after closing the book.
 
 Green
It’s not easy being Green. While still a small girl, she’s sold by her impoverished, widowed father to a stranger from another country. There, in the great city of Copper Downs, in her glorified prison-home of The Pomegranate Court, she begins several years of stern tutelage at the hands (and other instruments of punishment) of various mistresses, each an expert in an aristocratic art, such as cooking, sewing, or dancing. But despite her cultivation, the nimble-bodied and -minded girl remains an alien tigress, rebelliously clinging to her native memories and customs and, above all, an irrepressible yearning for freedom. As Green grows in size and skill, she discovers she’s being groomed as a concubine for the city’s apparently immortal duke — but also, by secretive allies, as something more. Soon enough, she becomes a living weapon who will forever change the countries on both sides of the sea; but will she wreak a storm of bloodshed or help the lands find peace?
As penned by the prolific and prodigiously talented Jay Lake, Green’s autobiography is at once classic and distinctive. While remarkable for its world-building (which includes another humanoid race, steam-powered ships, and rudimentary pistols) and eloquent authenticity in Green’s narrative voice, the novel can, at least in part, be considered as a definitive bildungsroman of an otherworldly, yet all-too-human, ninja. It includes elements of The Name of the Wind, Assassin's Apprentice, and The Joy Luck Club (while Green herself is a close cousin of Joss Whedon’s warrior-girls, such as River Tam); but it still finds a niche of its own. Writing such as this certainly helps:
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I wish that the past were so much more open to me, as it is to the blue-robed men who sit atop the shattered heads of ancient idols in the Dockmarket at Copper Downs.
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The last of his pleasure fled as a bird before a storm. “It is not a lesson to be taken. Your circumstances and hers are as different as the stars are from the lamps of your house.”
“Both light the night,” [I replied.]
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“We each carry a measure of grace, and we each carry a measure of evil. There is never enough grace to banish the evil, and there is never enough evil to smother the grace.”
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“Stand me a purse for my fare home, and a worthwhile consideration for my time. Give it to that man Nast outside. He would provide a receipt for his own grandmother, I am sure of it, and know years later on which hook he hung her.”
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It is difficult to persuade people to a cause when you are coated in drying sewage.
In sum, Green is a compelling, gritty chronicle of one girl’s struggle to make her mark on the world without shattering either it or herself. At times, I hoped for a touch more insight into the other humanoid race (the pardines), the magic system, and the exact nature of Green’s ultimate opponent. Also, a couple of unlikely events felt more like plot-points than parts of a naturally unfolding tale; and I’d alert sensitive readers to the significant presence of (non-gratuitous) violence and (homo)sexual content. Nonetheless, Green could easily endure as a minor classic and is highly recommended for mature fantasy fans, especially those partial to exotic settings or thieves and assassins. I have no doubt this will be one of the best fantasy books I’ll read this year. 4½ dripping blades. —Rob Rhodes
 Green
Green is barely a toddler when her father sells her to Federo, a man who travels around looking for young female children on behalf of a faraway Duke. Taken halfway across the world, not even able to speak the local language, Green is imprisoned in the Pomegranate Court, where she endures a ruthless training program designed to mold her from an innocent, illiterate child into a sophisticated courtesan or concubine for the Duke’s court. Various Mistresses teach her the skills a lady needs and punish her cruelly at the slightest misstep or shortcoming. It isn’t until Green meets the Dancing Mistress, a catlike “pardine” who ends up teaching her much more than just dancing, that she begins to get a better understanding of the city surrounding the Pomegranate Court — and her real purpose for being there...
As a novel, Green is a mixed bag. There’s much to like here, and it isn’t hard to see why some readers raved about this book. At the same time, some of its aspects may prevent you from truly enjoying all it has to offer. In the end, I couldn’t get over Green’s problems, and while I enjoyed some sections of the novel, in the end my opinion wasn’t a positive one.
The real star of Green is its eponymous main character. Describing Green as a strong female protagonist doesn’t even begin to do her justice. Put through an inhuman training program at such a young age that she ends up having a larger vocabulary in the new language than in her mother tongue, she never loses her focus or her courage for a moment, tackling each challenge head-on and mastering an impressive array of skills, from cooking to martial arts. Rather than being cowed when she meets the “Factor” who runs her training, she refuses to accept the name he bestows upon her (“Emerald”). In an act of rebellion, she takes to calling herself “Green” instead, because she doesn’t know the word for “emerald” in her original language. Later in the novel, as her circumstances change, she continues to be a fascinating and deep character.
Another positive aspect of Green is Jay Lake’s distinctive and gorgeous prose, something I’ve come to expect from this author after having read several of his short stories in the past. Take, for example, this paragraph, less than a page after a very young Green meets her first Mistress in the Pomegranate Court:
She was to be my first killing, at a time when I should already have known far better. I would have slain her that initial day, out of simple spiteful anger. It was the work of years to lacquer the nuances of a worthy, well-earned hatred over the fearful rage of the child I was.
Unfortunately a strong main character and lovely prose weren’t enough to make this novel work for me. The first section, focusing on Green’s training, is probably the best part of the book, but it ends with a plot twist I found highly improbable to say the least. Although there’s an explanation that makes it slightly more plausible later on, it almost made me give up on the novel right then and there. Things don’t improve much from that moment on. In a later part of the novel, when Green has entered an all-female religious order, the story features some lesbian sex scenes and BDSM-style whipping sessions. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this (on the contrary, as far as I’m concerned), but Jay Lake ruins it by using the truly cringe-worthy euphemism “sweetpocket” for a woman’s genitalia and making references to intercourse between minors like Green and the older “Mothers.”
Towards the end of the novel, Green improbably gets involved in the fight to save a city she should feel little or no loyalty towards at all. This leads to some unconvincing theological noodling and a rushed and improbable ending that left me frustrated more than anything. I truly enjoyed the first 150 pages or so of this novel, but after a strong start, Green completely fell apart, to the point where I strongly considered giving up on it several times. If not for Jay Lake’s beautiful prose and some lingering curiosity about Green’s fate, I probably would have ditched this novel long before the end.
Side note: Green is graced by a beautiful and striking cover illustration by Dan Dos Santos, but what may strike some people most about it is the skin color of the protagonist, who is clearly described as having “dark brown” skin in the novel but appears to be distinctly paler on the cover. Regardless, whether this is intentional “white-washing” or not, it’s a gorgeous and memorable cover.
In the end, it’s hard not to have mixed feelings about Green. Parts of the novel are excellent, while others are so poorly executed that it almost makes you forget about the good bits. Unfortunately, most of the better parts come early on, and the poor ones later, so by the time you reach the end of the novel you’re left with a bad taste in your mouth. I had high hopes for this novel, based on Jay Lake’s excellent short stories, but after turning the final page, I felt mostly disappointed that Green didn’t deliver on its early promise. —Stefan Raets
 Endurance
In Endurance, Jay Lake continues the exploration of a strange and beautiful world. We feel the smoothness of a length of silk, hear the sounds from the docks, smell the curries and the spices in the food cooked in the taverns. As Green, his main character, travels through Copper Downs, the reader sees the city from the roofs she travels, and wanders deep into the tunnels and caves beneath the city’s foundation. We see the rust-frozen machines used eons ago, built by the sorcerer-engineers to work the mines, the city’s genesis.
Green herself is an interesting character, at her most engaging when she is being rebellious. Her very identity was born in an act of rebellion in the first book of the series, Green, and in Endurance, the warrior woman who birthed the ox-god Endurance tries to both fight and talk her way free of any entanglements, mostly with the gods and avatars who inhabit the northern city that has somehow become Green’s home and responsibility.
Green has some trouble with the human politicians of Copper Downs, too:
After I ate I commenced to carving my name in the mahogany tabletop with one of my short knives. It was a horrible abuse of such a decent weapon, but I wanted to motivate the council to respectful haste. If not this time I called, the next.
Two things damage the power of the story and the character of Green: a weak plot and a narrative voice that undercuts the character. This is especially problematic because Green is a first-person narrator.
The plot is the larger problem here. This is the second book of three, and is hampered already by being to some extent a “gathering of the forces” story. For me, though, the biggest plot problem in Endurance actually started in Green. Near the end of the first book, Green took an action inspired not by her own motivation — not by fear, anger, or hope; not by her personal philosophy or a sense of strategy — but because the plot needed her to, in order to create a certain consequence that will play out in the remaining two books. The consequence of that poorly supported action does loom large in this book. In Endurance, Green does not drive the plot with her actions. Things come to her with suspicious ease. When she meets the two elderly twins from Hanchu in the dock-market, it is so implausibly coincidental that I kept waiting for those characters to admit that they had staged it.
The worst plot point by far is Green’s decision to launch a pre-emptive war against one of the city’s gods. This decision is contrary to everything Green herself knows about that god, and she knows quite a bit. About two-thirds of the way through the book, Green decides, again arbitrarily, that she has made a mistake, and calls off the war. Green, meant to be a strong, brilliant, powerful woman, does not look like the brightest candle in the temple here.
This is not helped by Lake’s choice of narrative voice. These stories are told to us by Green herself, from some point in an unidentified future. Throughout this book, Green points out how stupid her choices were, how wrong she was, how blind to the obvious she was. In case you think I’m exaggerating, here are three examples taken at random from the first one hundred pages of the book:
- Later, I was to wish mightily that I had possessed more imagination in the moment.
- I could only see my fear... [quote shortened to avoid spoilers] and my revulsion at the death of an innocent in my place. I could not see what was really happening.
- It occurred to me that lately my judgment of what was important had been flawed.
If every one of these sentences were stripped out, the events of the book might look more like the reversals and betrayals they are supposed to be. As it stands, the plot weakens Green by making her passive, and the narrative voice makes her look stupid. When Green, the rebel, is being manipulated by gods and the avatars of gods, the book is finely ironic. When she is acting against her own character, it is not.
The first person point of view creates a more traditional problem as well. Near the end of the book, the sorcerer-engineers come to Green’s aid, using their brass apes in a street battle — a strange and probably wonderful spectacle that we never see, because Green is not present, and are only told about in a one-sentence aside.
What is interesting here is Lake’s expansion of this world’s view of the gods, a structure not unlike the early Christian Gnostic cosmology. Forces in Green’s world have employed god-slayers, attempting to shift the balance of powers in the world. At the end of Endurance, Green is preparing to follow the villains back to the nation of her birth and take the fight to them. I am still intrigued, but less eager to follow Green back to Kalimpura. I want Lake to let Green take charge of her own story. —Marion Deeds
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Greetings from Lake Wu 
Rocket Science
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