“Myths are the darkest and brightest incarnations of who we are. They slip into our dreams and underpin our reality.”

I can’t quite remember how I found The Library of Legends but I was swept away by this heartbreaking novel that expertly melded historical fiction and folklore.

Set in 1937, during the second Sino-Japanese war, Lian is part of a group of Minghua University students that must evacuate West. With them, they each carry a part of their university’s greatest treasure: a collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends. However as Lian gets to know her fellow students, she realises that there may be more to the world than what she sees.

The Library of Legends drew me in on two levels – the first was the description of the evacuation. It’s definitely not all roses and I could feel the hardship that the students were going through, and I was fascinated by the politics at play. This is a pre-communist China, so we see the communist party recruiting, but also an intelligence agency trying to stop them. This part of the story alone could have carried the whole novel.

However, the book went one level deeper to introduce an element of fantasy based on Chinese folklore. I don’t think this is a spoiler because it happens pretty early on, but we get confirmation that all the deities mentioned in the myths and legends exist AND they are also called to evacuate from where they are from. As this happens, we learn more about the tragic myth of the Willow Star and the Prince, which gives us fodder for the third strand of story – the love triangle (of sorts) between Lian, her classmate Shao, and his maidservant Sparrow.

I have to admit, I found the love triangle to be the most frustrating part of the story for most of the book. While I understand what Chang wants to do with love and fate and all that, I just felt like Shao was so obtuse for most of the book. It was only towards the end, where we started to learn more about the Willow Star and the Prince, that I started to understand why he was the way he was. Still, as a reader who generally does not like love triangles, I didn’t enjoy most of that subplot.

But what kept me reading, and what I enjoyed overall, was the way the book pulled me back in time and into a different reality. If the book is accurate, then I probably learnt a lot more about the living conditions of the second Sino-Japanese war than I did before I started this, and I got to see a lot of folklore as well. All in all, I still really recommend this book, especially for those who are looking for a story inspired by Chinese culture.