A little over a week ago, I turned in my book manuscript (with a huge sigh of relief) to my copy editor and left town the next day for a bit of family vacation followed by three days at the annual conference of the Association of Women Martial Arts Instructors. I’ve been writing for a long time and seriously pursuing romance since 2016, but I’ve been training in the mixed martial of kajukenbo since 2008 and teaching since 2015. For my vacation reading, I decided it was time to bring the two interests together! I managed to read three martial arts romance novels during my vacation week, and I have a couple other options still waiting on my TBR pile.
Wuxia Inspired Martial Arts Romance
Sherry Thomas’s wuxia romance duology, The Heart of Blade, has been on my list for a while. Just knowing it was inspired by wuxia — the same literary tradition that brought us Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — was enough to make my ears prick up. It’s billed as a novel, My Beautiful Enemy, and a prequel, The Hidden Blade. I didn’t read reviews before diving in, so I was about 20% into The Hidden Blade before I realized that it was really going to be all about the tragic adventures that give the couple in My Beautiful Enemy their angsty backstory. I was half expecting that it would cover a different couple but it did not. That’s my no-HEA-in-the-prequel warning!
Book details
Title: My Beautiful Enemy
Author: Sherry Thomas
Original publication date: 2014
Setting, time & place: 1880s & 1890s, Chinese Turkestan, Qing Dynasty China, London & Somerset, England
He is… an agent of the British Crown, talented with languages, early 30s, has a good income
She is… a martial artist of mixed Chinese & English heritage, carrying out covert ops to win approval of her step-father, late 20s
Reasons to read this title: A well-done genre mashup bringing together tropes of both Chinese-language wuxia and English-language romance
My review of My Beautiful Enemy
Is it a romance? Yes, trials are overcome and the couple are reunited. (Prequel The Hidden Blade is all trials and tribulations.)
Must read romance? For diverse historical romance, yes. For romantic suspense, yes. If you’re happy with infinite English dukes, no.
First, what is wuxia? And what are wuxia novels?
“Wuxia” means “martial heroes.” The stories detail the adventures of said martial heroes as they seek vengeance, right wrongs, and hold to honor. My impression is that the closest analogue in English language might be Westerns — lots of fighting, but with martial arts rather than guns. But also like mafia stories, because there are alliance groups and very important allegiances between students and masters, followers and gang leaders. It doesn’t sound like it especially lends itself to romance, which I think may be why a) the prequel novel, The Hidden Blade, is all adventure and vengeance, and b) why Thomas brings her heroine out of China to meet her English love interest.
When I started looking for English translations, I quickly realized why Thomas’s duology feels like it wants to be a trilogy. Wuxia stories run long. You can jump in at wuxiaworld.com, where there are translated stories in the thousands of chapters. It looks to me like many of the popular wuxia stories have a word count in excess of 5 million! I’m prone to falling down rabbit holes, but even I can see that I don’t have time to follow this. I think most of us learned in grade school that China is the most populous country on the planet. A simple internet search gives me adult literacy rates of over 96% in China. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the Chinese market for reading material is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the English language romance genre is huge, but that’s just peanuts to these wuxia stories. Any kung fu movie you’ve seen where people are paralyzed by a single strike and the martial artists are taking wire-assisted flying jumps across rooftops is probably a wuxia story.
I’m actually not going to talk about the romance or the fight scenes from Thomas’s duology. The aspect of the books which really intrigued me was the depiction of the master-student relationship. After over a decade of training, my relationship with my martial arts instructor, while not as strict or formalized as in the wuxia world, has many of the complexities of a parent-child relationship. More than that, I have an extended kung fu family: I have “cousins” who train with teachers who came up through the ranks with my teacher. I have relationships with schools founded by teachers who got their start under my teacher. And there are names for all of these relationships! My school only uses a few of the Cantonese terms, but there are specific terms for relationships such as “student of my teacher’s teacher who started training after my teacher.” Cantonese (and Mandarin and other languages) also has a similar specificity of terms for blood relations: younger uncle, older sister, etc. These two types of relationships blend together as well: fellow students (and their children) babysit my kid, and at last weekend’s conference I was learning from women who are married to their martial arts teachers, as well as women who have passed their art on to their biological children.
Having a sense of these kind of relationships, it was very interesting for me to see how the resulting loyalties affected a romance story. In many romances, I see protagonists pulled between loyalties to lover and to family. Take Pride and Prejudice for our archetypal romance: Lizzie’s initial issues with Darcy have a lot to do with his attitude toward her family. Later, she learns that he acted out of loyalty to his own family. When he acts to protect her family it goes a long way toward softening her heart toward him because she can be with him without compromising loyalty to her family. Now add in the martial arts family for the wuxia stories, and you can see that Thomas had an extra layer of complexity to play with!
In Thomas’s duology, the lovers are connected by a common teacher, who was also an instructor to their nemesis. The hero’s main antagonist in the prequel is a really nasty family member, whose betrayal leads the hero to rely upon his teachers. The heroine, having been orphaned, is divided between loyalty to her martial arts teacher and her step-father. These varying loyalties both bring the couple together, and push them apart at different times. And while the lovers may try to turn away from each other at times, both maintain a strong loyalty to their teacher-figures throughout! I would happily read more stories that play with that aspect of emotional loyalties.
A last wuxia note: my only previous exposure was obsessive rewatching of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in high school. It’s not up on Netflix right now, but I watched the sequel, Sword of Destiny, which definitely explores the conflicts between loyalty to lover, family, and martial arts master. I’m not going to spoil how things tangle and untangle in Sword of Destiny, but I can say that unlike the spectacularly tragic ending of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the second movie keeps not one, but two pairs of lovers alive to the end!
Tang Dynasty Martial Arts Romance
After Sherry Thomas, I picked up another book I’ve been hearing about: Jeannie Lin’s Chinese historical Butterfly Swords. It’s the beginning of a historical series set in Tang Dynasty (8th century AD) China.
Book details
Title: Butterfly Swords
Author: Jeannie Lin
Original publication date: 2010
Setting, time & place: 758 AD China, Tang Dynasty
He is… a blond barbarian warrior
She is… a sword-wielding imperial princess escaping marriage to a warlord plotting against her father
Reasons to read this title: Non-European historical
My review of Butterfly Swords
Is it a romance? Yes. Harlequin Historical #1014.
Must read romance? I had issues with this book. I’d recommend looking for newer non-European historicals.
My first reaction to this book is that I hadn’t known how annoyed I could be by instalust. But just because that’s not my jam doesn’t mean other readers aren’t into it. My bigger conflict with Butterfly Swords is that the heroine is never truly empowered by her martial arts skills.
The heroine, Shen Ai Li, is the youngest child, the only daughter, and she’s set up to be used to further the family’s political power (as I would expect in this historical context). When a loyal soldier tells her that her fiance was responsible for the death of one of her brothers, she flees her wedding procession and runs into a barbarian warrior name Ryam. Ryam is from the West somewhere and was attached to a “Lost Legion” led by someone named Adrian, which made me think “Roman” except we’re several hundred years past the Roman Empire. I don’t want to drag on the vagueness of plausibility, because it’s no better or worse than Regency Duke #3748 marries Plucky Governess, but the hero’s background is incredibly vague. I have some thoughts about his characterization as a Barbarian that I hope to return to when I read Blaze, the only old school romance with a Native American hero I have on my syllabus.
But back to Sword Princess Ai Li. She was trained by her grandmother, a sword fighter who only married the dude who could beat her in a fight, and claims she let Grandfather win because she liked him. This character is likely inspired by Yim Wing Chun, first student of the founder of the Wing Chun style (Bruce Lee’s first art) who made a similar vow. As I train in an empty hand style, I had to look up butterfly swords–turns out they are the weapon of choice for Wing Chun. Here’s butterfly swords versus staff, and versus long sword. So our heroine has an unbeatable grandmother and five older brothers to grow up training with! She’s only been confined to the role of Imperial princess for the last year. Dad and Grandfather are brilliant military strategists and she’s picked that up. This chick should be a Bad Ass, right?
Her first fight is with the hero. He beats her and wins a kiss.
Later they spar and does she beat him then? No, he slings her over his shoulder because he’s overcome with lust. (Overcome with lust for her is his main personality feature.)
But, wait, does she get to fight other people for her honor? She does fight against the soldiers of her fiance, and her fiance himself. She manages to cut his face! But he captures her anyway. The final showdown is a fight between Barbarian Ryam and Power-hungry Fiance. Barbarian Ryam also gets to fight with one of Ai Li’s brother’s over her honor. And he fights the fiance’s soldiers to try and save her.
When Ai Li’s father, the emperor, arrives, he sanctions the fight between Barbarian and Fiance. Then the emperor decides that the barbarian can have his daughter and be the warlord of the province the emperor ruled before he became emperor.
I wanted Ai Li to have more of a chance to fight for herself. She never gains any personal or political power for herself, nor does she show much interest in gaining any. Instead she remains a political pawn throughout the book. Even though she’s got some cool sword skills. Plus, remember her grandmother?
Where Thomas used the master-student relationship to set up much of the plot in her duology, Lin’s book glosses over that relationship almost entirely. Grandmother appears for all of one scene, during which she promises to fight the hero and let him win if he seems nice. Another character fighting for the heroine’s honor instead of the heroine. But of all the fights that could have been in the book — this one doesn’t happen and I am so disappointed! Can you imagine if, instead of an anticlimactic honor-fight with an angry brother who never liked sword fighting anyway, the hero had to fight angry swordmaster grandma? I have been robbed. Obviously I need to write that scene. In the midst of a book that gives the heroine power over her own situation.
There are several other books in Lin’s Tang Dynasty series, of course. There’s the disappointed fiance and the heroine’s four surviving brothers who presumably need to find love. The fourth book, The Sword Dancer, has another sword-wielding heroine and I hope to find time to read that one. I am hoping that the things which bothered me about Butterfly Swords will be improved in Lin’s later work.
Contemporary Martial Arts Romance
I also received a recommendation for a contemporary story by Meg Maguire. Previously published under the title Driving Him Wild but now out as Takedown, this is a story from the Harlequin Blaze line with a MMA fighter heroine. Unfortunately, my vacation was over before I got into it! I’ll add it to the TBR pile for now…
Other Martial Arts Romance Recommendations
I know there are plenty of stories with warrior and fighter heroes, but I wanted to specifically look for books with bad ass heroines. I did stumble across another book called Sword-Dancer, which is a 1986 fantasy romance that looks, umm, like a product of its time. And as I was reading this, I remembered reading Sue London’s Trials of Artemis way back when it was a new release and being pleased by the heroine’s weapons collection. If you’ve got any others, please let me know!
