Strong Winds Return Home Danmei Novel Review
This is a review for Strong Winds Return Home (长风有归处) by 语笑阑珊. I read a fan-translated version by Neon Dragonfly Translations. There’s some amazing fan art of a fake cover here, which inspired me to read the book as part of a reading group in the All Things Danmei facebook group. The summary of the book from the carrd is: Strong Winds Return Home tells the story of Liu Xian’an, a brilliant yet misunderstood doctor who prefers sleep over anything and Liang Shu, a petty prince with the reputation of a ruthless general but who in reality is a clingy brat.
Summary
For me Strong Winds Return Home ended up being a 2/5, and I didn’t finish it. I did read to chapter 77, about 55% of the way through, so this review is only intended to reflect that part of the book. While I found one of the two leads very interesting, the other was much less so. The secondary characters had promise but ultimately I didn’t feel like the author was capable of delivering on that promise. The plot was decent but required some suspension of disbelief, and the worldbuilding felt contrived in support of the plot. The writing style was a big miss for me as well, pulling me out of the story.
Romance and Main Characters
I really liked the main POV character, Liu Xian’an, and especially his rich inner life. It was really fascinating to see the ways in which his brilliance and his anti-social behaviors were embraced within the context of Daoism. More than any other book I’ve read about cultivation, this story prompted me to pick up an old Dao De Jing copy that’s been gathering dust since my teenaged foray into Asian philosophy, and even download a new translation to refresh my understanding of Daoist philosophy.
However, the main romantic interest, Liang Shu, felt like a Mary Sue character for me. He was supposed to be equally misunderstood, but after reading most of the story all I got from him is that he was a fierce general but also a little nice sometimes. There was nothing specific about his personality or background that clearly made him so uniquely suited to understand Liu Xian’an when others had failed. He lacked depth or complexity, feeling more like a perfect foil constantly supporting Liu Xian’an perfectly in everything. A bit of fantasy for the reader, I suppose, who is intended to see this all progress through Liu Xian’an’s perspective. I wish Liang Shu had felt more fully realized, with his own depth and inner motivations.
The romance between the two was very sweet, but also facing almost no obstacles. Perhaps as a result, once the characters expressed their mutual attraction and started making out on the regular, I struggled to stay engaged.
Secondary Characters
If Liang Shu felt like a foil for the plot, I would double down on that point for almost all of the side characters as well. They mostly feel like props for Liu Xian’an, only there to play some comic relief most of the time or to enable the two main leads to get closer together. The outlines of the side characters were intriguing, but there wasn’t anything under the surface.
Plot
One of the things I prize in a danmei novel is a plot that’s as compelling as the romance, and this book didn’t quite deliver but did a decent job trying. The plot revolves around outlaws fomenting a revolution. While it starts out feeling like a series of unrelated encounters, by the midpoint of the story these are starting to draw together into a cohesive whole. The plot itself was intriguing, but the involvement of the two main leads is the part that required some suspension of disbelief. Why are these two people the best suited to investigate? They seemed to have little to no personal connection, and the professional connections struck me as somewhat dubious.
Worldbuilding
Like the secondary characters, the historical and political world created for this story seemed mostly a foil for Liu Xian’an. It’s a typical historical setting, but both the political side as well as the local environment around Liu Xian’an’s family felt greatly simplified over some other similar danmei novels I’ve read. This book was clearly a character study more than anything else, and that can sometimes work beautifully—it just didn’t come together for me.
Writing Style & Translation
I struggled with this book from the beginning due to the staccato language style. The rhythm of the language felt disruptive to the sense of place and character in the story—it didn’t seem to reflect the style of the main POV character. I like a lot of different writing styles when they add to the experience of reading a story, but this didn’t work for me. I do wonder how much was lost in translation, both literally and in terms of reference to other similar writing styles. I understand from some people who have read this in the original Chinese that the wordplay is really funny, but that didn’t come through in the translation.
Spice Level
2 peppers for this book. There’s some explicit snogging and less explicit fantasies about more, and depending how you interpret the translation maybe some groping? But no explicit on-page intimacy beyond that.
