Living in an all-woman community of Animal Wives-half-Yokai women of unnatural beauty who marry humans in order to steal their wealth-Mari is “considered ugly,” Jean says. Set in a mythic Japan of the past where gods leave smudges on the foreheads of emperors to single them out and supernatural beings called Yokai walk among men, Empress of All Seasons’ protagonist Mari finds herself out of step with those around her. Time and again when deciding what shape her narrative would take, she was determined to, in her own words, “burn tropes.” With her second young adult novel, Empress of All Seasons, Jean, who is half-white and half-Japanese, set out to address the issues that had once convinced her that writing fantasy simply wasn’t in the cards for a girl like her. Dominated by white characters and heavily influenced by Western mythology, those books both drew her in and kept her at a distance. Growing up, Emiko Jean was always a big fan of fantasy novels.
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