Lightning Review

After the Dragons by Cynthia Zhang

B+

After the Dragons

by Cynthia Zhang

After the Dragons is a subtle, tender love story set in a near-future Beijing in which dragons are as real as the climate change which has brought drought to the city.

Eli, the biracial son of two professors, has come to Beijing as an exchange student, wanting to learn more about the city that his grandmother loved too much to leave, even when faced with a terminal diagnosis. Kai has received the same diagnosis as Eli’s grandmother, but is doing his best to ignore it out of existence by focusing all of his energy on rescuing and rehabilitating abandoned dragons.

Kai and Eli’s prickly, affectionate relationship is at the heart of this book, and I especially appreciated the tension between autonomy and beneficence. Kai’s illness is chronic and life-threatening, and while treatments are available, there is no cure for it. Eli is a medical researcher, a natural caretaker, and not someone who is good at leaving well enough alone. Also, obviously, it’s difficult to accept that the person you are falling in love with is going to die young. I appreciated that the story had room for us to sympathise with both protagonists, and where they were coming from.

I also really liked the plot thread about the dragons that Kai is determined to rescue. The dragons themselves were a delight, but I also liked the way the book showed the value of doing something on a small, individual scale, even when a problem is massive. The story neither pretends that one person can single-handedly fix a structural problem, nor suggests that what one person can accomplish has no value. I feel like that’s a really helpful thing to be reminded of right now.

After the Dragons is more fantasy or science fiction than romance, and it has an atypical narrative structure – I am not sure I could say, even now, precisely what the story was about. It felt more like a short, important chapter in the lives of two people, rather than a story in which a problem is presented and then overcome, with all threads neatly tied up at the end. What it did have, in abundance, was a sense of place and of atmosphere, and I really loved that.

This is a hard book to grade. I am very sure that there are readers out there who are going to love this with all their queer-affirming, dragon-loving, slightly-dystopic, climate-fiction-appreciating hearts, and I really want this book to find them! But for me, the story was slightly unsatisfying. Too much was left unresolved for my taste.

Perhaps the issue is that I tend to read a novel with a central romance through a romance reader’s lens, and for me it didn’t quite work on that level. While the story has a happy-for-now ending, for me, this was overshadowed by Kai’s illness. But on reflection, I wonder if I’m missing the point. There was such a strong theme in this story of the importance of doing small kindnesses even when you can’t fix the larger problem, and perhaps that’s reflected in the nature of Kai and Eli’s relationship – happiness which is ephemeral is still meaningful and worth celebrating. (Having said that, I think I still prefer to imagine that the protagonists of the romances I read are always going to be happy and healthy and in love – and this story simply does not permit that fantasy.)

I found this book hauntingly beautiful. I loved the worldbuilding, and I really liked both Kai and Eli. I think it works brilliantly as speculative fiction. I’m not so sure it works as a romance… but I’m not sure it was trying to do so.

Catherine Heloise

Dragons were fire and terror to the Western world, but in the East they brought life-giving rain…

Now, no longer hailed as gods and struggling in the overheated pollution of Beijing, only the Eastern dragons survive. As drought plagues the aquatic creatures, a mysterious disease—shaolong, or “burnt lung”—afflicts the city’s human inhabitants.

Jaded college student Xiang Kaifei scours Beijing streets for abandoned dragons, distracting himself from his diagnosis. Elijah Ahmed, a biracial American medical researcher, is drawn to Beijing by the memory of his grandmother and her death by shaolong. Interest in Beijing’s dragons leads Kai and Eli into an unlikely partnership. With the resources of Kai’s dragon rescue and Eli’s immunology research, can the pair find a cure for shaolong and safety for the dragons? Eli and Kai must confront old ghosts and hard truths if there is any hope for themselves or the dragons they love.

LGBTQIA, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
This book is available from:
  • Available at Amazon

  • Order this book from Barnes & Noble
  • Order this book from Kobo

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

↑ Back to Top