After the events of The Girl with Ghost Eyes, Li-lin has set up shop as the Daoshi—a Daoist priestess—for a rival tong in 1890s San Francisco. She has plenty of work settling ghosts and serving as a bodyguard, enough to keep her mind off of the fact that her father disowned her at least some of the time. At least she has the ghost of her father’s eye to keep her company. In The Girl with No Face, by M.H. Boroson, Li-lin runs across a problem so big, so awful, that she has to reach out to her stubborn father for help before they are all doomed.
It starts with a small mystery. Li-lin is presented with the body of a young girl who died under strange circumstances. When Li-lin begins to prepare for the girl’s funeral rites, she discovers that the girl’s soul is gone. From there, Li-lin ends up on the trail of someone who is abusing Chinese folk magic for their own ends, a vampire tree, some old enemies from deep in her past, and a spirit who wants to set itself up as a god in San Francisco.
What I loved about this entry in the Daoshi Chronicles is the further development of Li-lin’s character. She has always been pushing boundaries. In the first book in the series, she pushed because she knew she could be more than just an apprentice to her father…and because she couldn’t bear to destroy the ghost of her father’s eye. Mr. Yanqiu became more to her than a tool; he became an entity in his own right, deserving his own existence. In this book, Li-lin’s feminist sense of justice comes to the fore. She lives in a very sexist place and time. Even her own father, who loves her, tries to limit her abilities and actions. Women are regularly treated as pawns. It turns out that is something Li-lin cannot abide. So, not only is Li-lin fighting monsters (human and otherwise), but she also fights (verbally, for the most part) to change people’s views about the rights of women.
In the author’s note at the end of The Girl with No Face, Boroson explains the amount of research that went into creating Li-lin and her father’s Daoist magic, as well as the beliefs of Chinese people at the end of the nineteenth century—and reveals the liberties that were taken to make the magic come to life on the page. Because of all the research (this book comes with a recommended reading list), there are some parts where the characters deliver mini-lectures about what they’re doing and what’s going on. In any other circumstances, this might have annoyed me. Because I know so little about the time, the place, and people, however, I didn’t mind at all. It also helped that there are some spectacular fight scenes in this book. The ending is a showstopper.
I strongly recommend this novel for fans of historical fantasy who are looking for something from a non-Western European tradition. Even if that’s not what you’re looking for, I would still recommend this book because it’s an absolute hell of a read.