Jade City
- 512
- Pages
- about 9 h
- Reading time
- World Fantasy Award for Best Novel
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Our view
“Jade City” opens the Green Bone Saga with its strongest card: a vividly built city where family loyalty, magic and war are bound together. Some readers find the first half slow and the prose inclined to explain where it might show, with characters who take a while to come alive. Once the conflict ignites it grips, and it suits readers who like dark, tense, family-centred fantasy.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Jade City is a 2017 fantasy novel by Fonda Lee. It is the first novel in the Green Bone Saga and was followed by Jade War (2019) and Jade Legacy (2021). A prequel novella, The Jade Setter of Janloon, was released in 2022; and a collection of short stories, Jade Shards, was released in 2023. The novel received critical praise, winning the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the 2018 Aurora Award for Best Novel, and was a finalist for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Reading order · The Green Bone Saga
Full order & progress →- Jade CityThis book
8.28.2 / 10 - Jade War
8.58.5 / 10 - Jade Legacy
8.98.9 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.1 across 981 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 87% of the weight and the score stays at 8.2 — the Fantasy average of 8.0 barely moves it. A further +0.10 comes from the small bonus for major awards.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.0 | 6 | 1% |
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 975 | 99% |
Frequently asked
How long is Jade City?
It has 512 pages — shorter than 57% of the ranked books in Fantasy.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 8.2, the closest to this book.
