Review: The Dawn of Yangchen

The Dawn of Yangchen by F.C. Yee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

F.C. Yee already gifted us Avatar fans with two novels about young Kyoshi, and now he's back with the first of a promising new duology - at the very least - about Avatar Yangchen, the most recent Air Nomad Avatar before Aang in the cycle. I admit, there's not a lot to know about Yangchen because she gets so little attention in the main series - certainly compared to Kyoshi and Roku, Aang's two nearest predecessors, or Avatar Kuruk, who came between Yangchen and Kyoshi. If not for the fact that Kuruk's life story is very short and a serious downer, I'd be more surprised that Yee skipped past him to tell Yangchen's story instead. (Well, also, there's the fact that Yee has only ever written books with female protagonists to date, and that's a pattern this book keeps up.) But for this new book, I'm getting the vibe, even more so than with the Kyoshi novels, that this is the official commissioning of a novelization for which at least one upcoming work at Avatar Productions will be based. Well, they're already doing at least one Kyoshi project, I believe. But this book, especially with its story of a mysterious organization called Unanimity threatening to use a weapon of untold mass destruction in the face of the Earth King's dreadful leadership, it's absolutely the kind of story that would fit in perfectly to this universe. So far, though, there's no official announcement of the second book, but there's no way Yee isn't about to write one of those soon...

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