The Night Ends with Fire

This book is for the adults who watched Disney movies all the time as a kid and who hate what boxes the world puts them in all the time.

There are quite a few books lately that we compare to being “if x was x”. But some of them I find to be a stretch, where it is just used as bait to get you interested into the book itself. I have used it before with various series, like Fourth Wing being Hunger Games meets Eragon. This book, however, is very much one of those books and not in the ways that you think.

This book is quite literally Mulan mixed with Avatar the Last Airbender. Honestly, as I read the first 100 pages, it literally was the plot points of Mulan pretty much. China at the brink of a war, daughter wanting to escape the matchmaker process forced upon her disguise herself as a male solider to join the army. While in the army, she is constantly hiding herself from the others and completely underestimated by the higher-ranking members in the platoon, there is this weird love connection between her and the lieutenant. Like weirdly similar to Mulan, but always in a good way.

Where the Air Bender comes into play, is the grounding and supernatural elements, which are literally related to the elements in the world. Meilin - the main character uses her mental fortitude or qi to be able to control the powers of the sea through the dragon spirit found in a piece of jade. The dragon spirit is literally what Mushu would be if he was the "dragon warrior" in Mulan.

What this book does well is that it provides a very real look at what would happen when coming into these insane powers. You become greedy about them and they start to consume your every thought, that you can't handle being separated from them. Every second you think about how to make your power grow.

The ending of this book, leading for their to be a second is very well done as well. It takes the classic happy ending of what Mulan had, but flips it entirely. Like how the soldiers would actually react to find out that she was a woman pretending to be a man, the shock and anger they have is real, because not only were they lied to for the entirety of the war, but woman in that time in China were not allowed to join the army, and if they did, they were deemed dangerous and insane to some degree. Women were expected to marry and support their husbands, not come into positions of power. Which the dragon spirit did warn Meilin about.

As in Mulan, the band of unlikely heroes meet with the emperor to receive their praise for helping to end the war in a winning fashion and Meilin/Ren is praised for the work they did in single handedly taking down the main enemy in a powerful fight of the magic they both had through the jade pieces. The realistic approach in this one, is that Meilin's identity was given up by one of the soldiers as they were furious with the realization and did not one Meilin to gain a position of power in the army as that is "not a woman's place".

Being that there is a second book coming, I am excited to see the progression of what is to happen next. I want to see how she breaks free of the traditional Chinese views of women, where her power will take her or will it just destory her, what will happen with her love triangle between her and two princes each on a different side.