Bridge of Birds

Bridge of Birds is a comic quest novel set in a China of legend rather than of history, and it is narrated by a young man called Number Ten Ox, a strong, honest orphan from a small village of silk growers. A plague strikes it: the silkworms are poisoned, and every child between eight and thirteen falls into a coma. Ox goes to Peking to find a wise man and comes back with Li Kao, an elderly scholar who cheerfully admits to a slight flaw in his character. Master Li identifies the cause as ku poison, administered by two dishonest villagers, and concludes that only the Great Root of Power can wake the children.

The search takes the old man and the young one across the empire. They fall in with characters such as Miser Shen and Henpecked Ho, and every trail leads toward the Duke of Ch'in, a tyrant who removed his own heart to make himself invulnerable and hid it in a casket beneath a frozen lake. What look at first like separate escapades turn out to be bound together by the old legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, and by a children's rhyme and game. At the climax the beautiful Lotus Cloud is revealed as Jade Pearl, the Princess of Birds, whose crown the Duke stole centuries before. Master Li and Ox find the Duke's heart, Lotus Cloud helps destroy it, the birds form a bridge to heaven so that the Star Shepherd can be reunited with his princess, and the Great Root cures the children.

The book is short and quick, told in the voice of a fable, and very funny. It is also, as the critic Rich Horton put it, "often rather horrifyingly bloody," and the early chapters can feel like a string of unconnected adventures until the pattern shows itself. Kirkus summed up the mix as "Disney Studios, the Brothers Grimm, and Dungeons & Dragons in roughly equal proportions." Readers who like Terry Pratchett, or who want a fantasy that makes them laugh and then catches them off guard, should start here.