This review originally appeared on Goodreads on October 17, 2021.

The Disfavored Hero

By Jessica Amanda Salmonson – Ace Books – January 1, 1981

Review by Robin Marx

While I found the idea of a female samurai sword & sorcery protagonist appealing, I was a bit let down by the book itself.

The book starts off strong. Tomoe finds herself under the sway of an evil not-Chinese sorcerer, who compels her to join a demon horde and slaughter thousands of her former master’s warriors. She manages to free herself from this magical influence, but the damage is done: her master is slain and her honor as a samurai besmirched. She goes off on a journey to restore her good name.

Unfortunately, the book that follows is largely directionless and disjointed. It’s more of a sequence of events than a cohesive narrative. Tomoe is afflicted by a curse early on in the story that gets resolved about halfway through the story, and the book concludes with a duel with the shogun’s champion, who she encounters early on (not that there’s much of a dramatic build towards this duel, or a sense of inevitability), but there’s not really a driving plot. Tomoe wanders and experiences strange events involving magic and monsters.

The decision to set the book in an alternate world is a strange one. I suppose setting the story in “Naipon” rather than Nippon offers some cover for inaccuracies and allows license to do a “good bits version” of historical Japan. But Tomoe is a historical (if mythologized) figure and real world locations and religions are used, rather than fictionalized substitutes. Real Japanese terms appear frequently throughout, if occasionally misspelled or misused. Characters sometimes have names that would be unpronounceable in Japanese (“Noyimo”), and the western first name-last name order is used. I wished Salmonson had committed to either sticking close to the real Japan or taking a much freer hand with the source material. Her “Naipon” seems like a frustrating half-measure.

Published in 1981, this book is notable for using a non-Western fantasy setting and for having a lesbian heroine, but the plot wasn’t especially engaging.

★★☆☆☆

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