I started reading this teen fantasy tale during lunchbreak and was highly entertained, finding it hard to concentrate on work for the afternoon. A girl called Rain decides to go to war in the place of her simple brother, who is kind but slow and won’t survive a week. The draft demands a man from each household. STORMRISE takes off from there: Storm, as the girl now calls herself, dresses like a rural peasant boy and trains to the limit of her stamina.

Storm’s father is a former Neshu combat master – a martial art – and given that the army is needed to fight barbarians who have breached a Great Wall, this makes the tale sounds like a Chinese legend, mixed with the Terry Pratchett novel A Monstrous Regiment. Storm is skilled enough from her father’s training to be picked for a special army unit under the young commander Jasper. In order to strengthen her disguise, she takes a pinch of dragon powder each evening. The herb-witch assured her that this powder will make her more like a man. That’s not all it does and she starts dreaming about dragons.

In order to raise the stakes for our disguised heroine, author Jillian Boehme creates a law making it illegal for a woman to pretend to be a man; as only men can own property, a woman could be arrested as a thief. The matters of the heart also enter the tale, with some complexity, given the impersonation, battlefield and so forth. However, the presence of massive dragons brings the adventure to another stage and they created as many questions for me as they answered. We are not told how these apex predators would be fed, for a start, so they are written as a deux ex machina rather than from an ecology point of view.

Young adult readers will find this a riveting tale with some excellent descriptions and vivid accounts of danger. STORMRISE provides an example of how we may be stronger than we imagine and more capable than society would believe. I’ll look forward to reading more by debut author Jillian Boehme.  More please!