Review: The Rise of Kyoshi

The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While we're waiting another calendar year for F.C. Yee to give us the long-awaited sequel to The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, now Yee has started up another epic crush of a series centered on a kickass girl who needs to work a little extra-hard to realize her destiny is approaching faster than she expects. Only this time, Yee is building the origin story for a character we know pretty well, except perhaps less so than we thought until now: Avatar Kyoshi. She may have lived over 200 years in canon, but way back in her teens, she still had to come into her own as the Avatar just like Aang and Korra will eventually do later on. But Yee throws in a most unexpected twist: having those searching for the Avatar find someone else who may be the one, and completely overlooking Kyoshi even as she makes it clear that she's the true bridge to the Spirit World. Meanwhile there's a whole lot of conflict between various factions in the Earth Kingdom (its sheer size really makes it ungovernable in practice, doesn't it?) as well as a team of pirates trying to bring down the four nations, but because of the fact that they're, uh, pirates, they're primarily Water Tribe anyway (something of a call forward to Amon and the Equalists?) Yee devotes over 400 pages to all these in-universe issues, and there will be at least one more book - because while it's taken quite a while for him to really take off in the publishing world, he's finally getting the recognition he deserves from this book and from Genie Lo.

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