Review: A Hero Born by Jin Yong

A Hero Born by Jin Yong
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thank you to St. Martin's Press for sending me an ARC of this book. I'm really glad I had a print version to go along with the audiobook. The list of characters at the beginning was invaluable. There are so many characters and it was at times hard to keep them straight, especially as I'm not overly familiar with the naming conventions and several of the characters had multiple names. There were also large groups of people throughout the book that traveled together and being able to reference the list of characters from time to time was very helpful.

This book made me wish I knew more about Kung Fu. The moves and different styles were mentioned throughout as there is a heavy focus on the practice and how martial families are formed. As I mentioned above there are alot of characters, which leads to alot going on in this book. This causes the pace to be a bit slow, hence the reason I opted for the audiobook. At the center of the story we have two families that were very close. They’ve decided that their children will marry if one of them has a daughter and one has a son, or if they both have sons they will be sworn “brothers”. When they are both killed in a fight and their pregnant wives are separated, a Taoist monk and a group of Kung Fu masters known as the Seven Freaks of the South both swear to defend the children. We mainly follow the child who trains with the Seven Freaks, but the other child appears later in the book. I didn't really get the fantasy aspect of this book; there is a ton of action and fighting as well as the rich history of the Mongolians and Chinese. I think the fantasy part was lost on me due to my familiarity with the content, i still enjoyed it though. There are some wonderful messages about inner strength, honor, and family bonds whether chosen or by blood.

The writing takes some getting used to, but I expect that is because it was translated. I often find that is the case with books first written in another language.  This kind of reads like watching and old kung fu movie where you lose a bit in translation but you still get the gist of the story.  I still really enjoyed it, and didn't mind that sometimes the dialogue was clunky or the actions of the characters seemed silly. There is not a ton of character development in the book. The characters are just taken at face value. We do see Guo Jing develop some, but his personality and actions don’t change much throughout. That is the case for most of the characters, they don’t change much throughout. They are driven by honor and duty. I did find this very entertaining and I'm looking forward to the next two installments. This ends on quite the cliffhanger so be warned.

This book was published originally in 1957, but it was finally translated and published in the US in September 2019.  The remaining 3 volumes are set to release in 2020-2021. 


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