Grace Lin's Long-Awaited New Fantasy Novel Stars Her First Animal Protagonist

New York Times

11-04-2025

Fall into a hole and thump into Wonderland. Open a wardrobe and step into Narnia. Board a train on Platform 9¾ and end up at Hogwarts. Crossing thresholds comes naturally to children, which is one of the reasons middle grade fantasy is so popular. The quests are timeless.
Cue Grace Lin, whose latest novel, 'The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,' embraces this trope as well. Her setting is a bustling urban center, in the middle of which stands the Old City Gate. Passing through it is uneventful for humans (aside from entering a neighborhood filled with dangling red lanterns and traditional foods and crafts), but for a group of mythical creatures called Gongshi, it's the only way back to their realm of grasslands, rivers and mountains.
Gongshi are lively and fun-loving, but once they're in the modern world they manifest as stone, standing silent and still. They hide in plain sight in the form of statues, highway pillars and necklace pendants. Lifeless to the human eye, they watch over the city's populace and protect them from danger. All Gongshi take their job seriously — except for one.
Lin's main character, Jin, is a Gongshi lion cub who would rather play with his friends than play guardian. Early in the book, he becomes angry at his father and accidentally knocks over the Sacred Sphere, a golden ball that is never to be moved. As it bounces out of the house and through the Old City Gate, Jin chases after it, trying desperately to catch it. But he fails, and the gate clangs shut behind him. Jin is now stuck on the wrong side. Will the impetuous cub ever see his parents again?
For the remaining 300 pages, Jin is on a quest to reopen the gate and return home, an adventure that's both physically and emotionally taxing. Along the way he meets a girl, a sculptor and a dragon who takes the shape of a worm — not all of whom he can trust. Meanwhile, the other Gongshi spend several chapters also trying to reopen the gate, in hopes of rescuing Jin and retrieving the Sacred Sphere.
This narrative structure is one of Lin's signatures: parallel plotlines that hurtle forward and finally, triumphantly, converge. Other elements of her style that recur throughout her fantasy novels are equally energizing. She nests stories within stories, concocts lush place names like 'the City of Bright Moonlight,' creates vibrant full-color illustrations. Perhaps most tantalizing, her titles for these novels often sound like riddles: 'Where the Mountain Meets the Moon,' 'When the Sea Turned to Silver.' To solve them, readers must read on; book sales and awards prove that they do so with enthusiasm.
'The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,' however, struggles with pacing. The sculptor's story line — while a driver of the novel's main action — distracts from Jin's quest. Throughout the book, in an attempt to merge urban fantasy with pastoral otherness, Lin brings up smartphones, high-rises, subways, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The effect is jarring. There is only so much activity a gate can handle. Even a magical one.
What the novel gets right is Jin. A stubborn adolescent, he is different from Lin's previous heroes, all of whom are human and revere the power of stories. Jin only pretends to listen to his father's tales — until he exiles himself to a world where his only way out is trusting in their wisdom. The harder Jin's challenges become, the longer the gate stays closed — and the more the young lion matures. 'There were things more important than a game … more important than what he himself wanted. … That was part of being a stone spirit,' he admits to himself about two-thirds of the way through the book.
Jin is not the only skeptic to have his mind changed. Growing up in upstate New York, Lin rejected her Chinese heritage and resisted learning her mother tongue. But while studying illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, she traveled to Italy, where, sitting in a cafe and discussing her 'love of making books,' she realized she had completely ignored the rich material her own culture could provide. Gods and goddesses, fish and mermaids, sacred threads and stones — the possibilities were endless. She just had to step into that world and give it a chance.
Thresholds are vital in literature and in life. They allow Max to visit the Wild Things, and Dorothy to reach Oz; they enable writers to commute through time and space, to author coming-of-age stories for their characters and for themselves.
Lin traveled to China and to Taiwan (from where her parents emigrated) — her gateways across the Pacific — to steep herself in their symbols and mythology. Combining her observations with her fictional instincts, she produced a best-selling oeuvre, oxygenated with Chinese folklore. Each book is an ode to her roots, and a genuine celebration of diversity.
'The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon,' despite its shortcomings, demonstrates Lin's originality yet again, for she has inverted the trope. Her hero is magical instead of human. And her gateway matters not because Jin goes through it but because he returns home.