Becoming the next Empress of Honoku is anything but simple. Survive the palace's magical but deadly seasonal rooms and marry the emperor. Everyone is eligible unless you're Yokai, magical beings with the ability to transform. Mari's one goal is to steal the Emperor's wealth. But her life is on the line as she struggles to keep her identity hidden and learning that everything isn't as it seems.  

Empress of All Seasons is an ownvoices Japanese fantasy that was damn near perfect to read. I was obsessed entirely within the very first pages. 

The characters were brilliant. Rarely do I find a book where the entire cast was absolutely excellent. Mari, our main Yokai, has been raised by beautiful women whose primary goal is to seduce wealthy men and steal their wealth. Mari doesn't inherit the skills and looks, so her mother prepares her to train differently. Skilling fighting she competes in the competition to pull off a steal that would make her the greatest of Animal Wives. Taro, our cold Emperor to be, suffers from the hands of his terrible father and is a quick-thinking inventor that regrets his invention which enslaves all of the yokai. Akira, perhaps my favourite, is half human, half yokai. Mari's closest friend and helps her in more ways than she knows. Hanako, the leader of the resistance, that really deserves her own novel. 

The worldbuilding is where Empress shines. It's set in such a magical rich world that is really beautiful. The Imperial Palace with its seasonal rooms, the interlude with the lives of the gods', it's all so magical but dangerous which really made it compelling to read. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Empress is a standalone, I believe. Which is what made this a little disappointing, especially in the end. The final chapter leads to something more, something even more significant than what we get in the first book. But it's all very quickly wrapped up in a couple of paragraphs which suggest there will be no more novels. The world Emiko Jean has created is detailed and gorgeous, and I really hope it isn't just confined to just this one novel because that would be the biggest shame. 

For a way of conclusion, Empress almost ticked all the boxes but, nonetheless, I really loved it. A tale of family, honour and love, Empress is a compelling story that I genuinely didn't want to put down. I really hope Emiko Jean will return to these characters later, or at least this world. 

I really enjoyed this book, but I felt the ending was a little rushed--I thought we were gearing up to a sequel when I realised how few pages remained, and felt we were culminating in a new adventure. Startled to realise everything was wrapped up in an epilogue. That being said, the ending was excellent--but I think a few more pages could have been dedicated to it, to make it feel more complete.

Okay so I liked and I finished it but before I write my thought, I have a few questions... did Taro and Mari fall meet, fall in love and get married in like 5 days? Okay Romeo and Juliet, teenagers and shit, whatever. Another question Akira become became a bad ass warrior assassin in like 5 days? Okay magic and shit, whatever.

Positives:
I loved Asami and secretly wish she had been the empress of all season and our protagonist, not that I don't like Mari or anything
I loved the mythological interludes, very unique
I loved the world this character imagined and loved the seasonal room

Negatives
Asami was not a main character
Taro's dramatic character shift, I do not believe for a second he world have done what he did
I hate the ending the epilogue, the tight little bow and the happy ever narration

I liked the boy but I would probably never read if again

Friends, this is not it.

I hate getting super excited for a book based on its premise, and then the whole thing topples like a scaffolding of playing cards when read.

This should have been a good story, but it wasn't. The relationships didn't resonate. The adventures came the closest to actually being interesting, but still fell short of real points of interest. The side-plot of Spirit Freedom Fighters never got off the ground. So many of the characters were just cutout caricatures with 2 catchphrases and nothing else.

The end was just... weird. Nothing was resolved, everything fell apart into chaos, and the final "surprise" just made me scoff and shake my head.

Definitely a disappointment.

A really great book with an interesting premise

I had a similar problem with this one as I did with Crown of Feathers: cool concept, terrible execution.

Ultimately, I think this book suffers the most from pacing issues. There just wasn't enough space here to cover the story Jean wanted to tell and so the development of the plot and characters suffers so that as much ground as possible could be covered in a scanty 360 pages. Imagine taking the entire Hunger Games trilogy and squishing it down into one book, which completely skips Catching Fire and condenses Mockingjay into about 80 pages. That's what reading this book felt like. Jean's publishing team did her a huge disservice by not convincing her to make this into a duology or a trilogy.

And the sad part is that the bones of this story are incredibly interesting. I LOVED the concept of the Seasons Rooms and having warriors fight their way through the challenges each of these rooms presented. Its unique and I had so much fun trying to guess what Mari would have to fight in each of the rooms. Unfortunately, we only get to spend a chapter or two in each of the rooms and the little time we got to spend there was so disappointing. I also like the mythology of the world and how rich it is in real-world Japanese folklore. The early chapters where we got to hang with Mari in the Animal Wife village and learn about the different yokai that inhabit the world was fun. But, like everything else in this book, there wasn't enough time for Jean to convincingly build the world and the creatures in it.

Honestly, there were a lot of things I disliked about this book, but it would be really nitpicky of me to sit here and name them all because I genuinely feel that they could've been fixed with more time and book space. The romance, the Rebellion storyline, and Akira as a character may have sat better with me with more development. Same with the ending. I don't think I would ever have loved it but I might have accepted it better with more character development and a stronger romance.

Its extremely frustrating seeing what this book could've been and what it ultimately ended up being.

2.5/5

There were some promising parts to this story, but the pieces did not make for a great whole.

Check out my full review at Forever Young Adult.

This is incredibly hard to rate, I really loved the first 3/4 of this book. The ending was just a bit of a mess for me, it felt incredibly rushed and really could have used at least another 100 pages to actually tell the story instead of just wrapping it up super quick. That said I did really enjoy the characters and the story in the first 3/4 enough to give it three stars.

Mari is such a great character. She lives in a village made up of Animal Wives, yōkai who look like beautiful woman but hide a dark beast just under the surface. An Animal Wife's responsibility is to go off and convince human men to marry them before stealing off with the man's fortune. This she brings back to the other Animal Wives and continues in this fashion until she gives birth to a daughter, then her responsibility is training this new Animal Wife. Mari grows up being told by her mother and the other Animal Wives that she's not pretty enough to be a real Animal Wife. Her beast doesn't even fully shift her form as it does for "real" Animal Wives. So instead of the traditional method of making off with a man's fortune, her mother decides to train her to become the next Empress and make off with the Emperor's vast fortune. The Empress is determined in a competition between girls from all over the Empire who must brave the mysterious Seasonal rooms where dangerous yōkai lurk and even the weather is out to get them. I really liked Mari as a character, growing up surrounded only by women made her such an ally of her fellow women. Even when she was in competition with other girls she couldn't stop herself from trying to ensure their safety. I also liked that beyond the physical training her mother gave her she wasn't made out to be anything special. It's established she's no exceptional beauty and we see during the trails that she's not the smartest competitor. The secondary characters are equally interesting and I really enjoyed most of them. Akira, also known as the Son of Nightmares, is a half yōkai. He's grown up in the mountains near Mari's village, they meet when they're young and he becomes one of her only friends. It's clear early on in the book that he loves Mari and though she cares for him deeply she does not love him. I was worried about how this would work out in the book because a lot of times it's shown that the "nice guy" who's always there eventually gets the girl. I'm very happy with how everything worked out and felt Akira's journey was an important one. His identity of being half-yōkai and half-human causes him grief. He struggles to figure out who he really is and where he belongs in the world. Asami is another side character, I can't talk too much about her beyond the fact that she is another competitor but she was so great to read. I really liked her small arc. Hanako was amazing, she's a big part of Akira's arc and I really enjoyed when she showed up on the page. Finally, there's our Emperor to be, Taro. He feels like a somewhat familiar character, a future ruler who does not want the responsibility. Taro is a tinkerer, he loves to build and create things. He's got lots of clockwork creatures he works on and sadly tries to rely on for companionship. I really enjoyed Taro's objections to the competition, he doesn't wish to be a prize to be won. It's so interesting to see this reversed as a lot of stories revolve around female characters as prizes for men.

The story is also sprinkled with some chapters revolving around the Gods of the Realm. I'm a huge fan of mythology and I loved this intimate look at the mythology surrounding this world. I really thought this was potentially a five star read it's just such a shame that the ending was so rushed. We don't even see what I thought was framed as the battle between Mari and the ultimate big bad of the story. The outcome is just told to us in a quick line.