Blood Magic in YA Literature by Asian American Authors

Blood Magic in YA Literature by Asian American Authors

This article relates to The Last Bloodcarver

In Vanessa Le's debut YA novel The Last Bloodcarver, her heroine, Nhika, is the titular protagonist: a person with the power to alter anatomy with a single touch, able to travel through a body's bloodstream, and cure it, wound it, or end its life altogether. Bloodcarvers can also feed on blood and proteins from other humans and animals to heal themselves if they are ill or injured. Nhika inherits this blood magic from her family. Le is a Vietnamese American author who, according to her bio, "loves reading and writing stories about the Asian diasporic experience and high-concept magic systems." Her first novel, described as "a Vietnamese-inspired dark fantasy" incorporates both of these subjects into a steampunk secondary world. Le is far from the only YA author to include blood magic in a fantasy novel in recent years. The following list looks at books by other Asian American authors who incorporate this feature into their worldbuilding.

Xiwei Lu, who publishes under the name Marie Lu, was born in China and grew up in the US. In 2014, she published the first novel in a YA trilogy titled The Young Elites. Here, blood magic is not an inherited ability, but a consequence of a blood fever that affected children. The fever gave them psi powers, making them the objects of suspicion and prejudice. Lu's protagonist and main narrator, Adelina, is, unlike Nhika, an anti-heroine similar to Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Star Wars, and the trilogy's subsequent books, The Rose Society (2015) and The Midnight Star (2016), chronicle her tragic downfall.

South Korean-born, Minnesota-raised Kendare Blake published the first book in her Three Dark Crowns series in 2016. It revolves around a set of female triplets, each with an inherited power from their bloodline: Katharine, who is immune to all poisons; Mirabella, who commands the elements; and Arsinoe, who wields power over nature. While all three are heirs to the crown, only one can become queen and the sisters eventually have to fight each other to the death for the throne. In addition to Three Dark Crowns and the following novels One Dark Throne (2017), Two Dark Reigns (2018), and Five Dark Fates (2019), Blake published two prequel novellas, The Young Queens (2017) and The Oracle Queen (2018), which expand on the blood magic and origins of the three sisters.

In her Shadow Players trilogy — For a Muse of Fire (2018), A Kingdom for a Stage (2019), and On This Unworthy Scaffold (2021), Heidi Heilig creates a powerful heroine in Jetta, who can see the dead and bind their souls to her shadow-player family's puppets with her blood. Hawaiian-born Heilig is Chinese American and her series is inspired by Southeast Asian cultures and French colonialism. Similarly, in the 2021 YA novel Jade Fire Gold, Singaporean American author June C.L. Tan addresses colonialism, writing, "History is never written by its victims," and creating a world in which the characters are uncertain about their country's true past. In this novel, inspired by Chinese folklore and wuxia (martial arts) TV shows, Tan's heroine, Ahn, also struggles with her blood magic, which gives her the ability to steal people's souls.

Perhaps the closest to The Last Bloodcarver's Nhika in blood magic is the protagonist of Amélie Wen Zhao's Blood Heir trilogy. Zhao was born in Paris, raised in Beijing, and currently resides in New York, and her multicultural upbringing inspired the themes of her books. Her heroine, Ana, is the Crown Princess of the Cyrilian Empire and an Affinite, a magical person with the ability to control the world around them. Ana is similar to Nhika in that she is a Blood Affinite, one who can control and manipulate blood, even as it courses through a person's body. Like Nhika, Ana is feared, has to hide her power, and is forced to go on the run. Over the course of the three books, Blood Heir (2019), Red Tigress (2021), and Crimson Reign (2022), Ana eventually loses her blood magic and must discover who she is without it.

In addition to the aforementioned Asian American authors are many others, such as Lori M. Lee, with her Hmong-inspired Shamanborn series, and Lena Jeong, with her Korean-inspired Sacred Bone trilogy. All of these, along with Vanessa Le, bring their own perspectives to tales of dark fantasy and blood magic.

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Last Bloodcarver. It originally ran in April 2024 and has been updated for the March 2025 paperback edition. Go to magazine.