Lucky Seed by Justinian Huang

TL;DR: A twisted family with tons of fun plots and surprises.
Source: NetGalley – Thank you to the publisher!!

Plot: This one was a knot that I could not solve, but I enjoyed the journey so much I didn’t mind.
Characters: A big cast, all of these folks were different and unique.
Setting: By far the focus of this was on the characters, and not the setting. So there isn’t much I can give you on that – though I wish we’d had more about Big Bear!

Summary:

The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not.

Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential she must produce a male heir that bears the clan’s surname. She fears that if her generation is the one in which their esteemed lineage ends, they will be punished as “hungry ghosts” in the afterlife—an ancient but very real Asian superstition.

Faced with this terrifying fate, Roses summons her favorite nephew, Wayward. Believing him to possess the “lucky seed,” Roses presents Wayward with a mandatory to father a baby boy who will inherit everything. When the other members of the Sun Clan catch wind of Roses’s plot, all hells break loose. Wayward’s family will now clash like never before in an epic war over the future of the Suns…if there is a future at all.

Yet through the chaos, Wayward sees opportunity. What if he can leverage all the conflict into a solution for his problematic family? What if he can reunite the Sun Clan by healing them? And what if the tumultuous Suns can finally learn how to love each other for the first time?

Thoughts:

This was a read I got through very slowly but ended up loving. The cast of characters is vast and the story hops from character to character quickly as we watch this family plot and plan around each other. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how Justinian Huang would do this after The Emperor and The Endless Palace but it was fantastic.

The writing in here is just as magical even if the plot has no magic. As soon as I started to consume this book it flowed and moved in a way that was almost effervescent. Huang could write a grocery list and I think I’d be transported to the grocery aisle, soaking up the story of those listed items. This worked on so many levels for the prose.

The characters too were fantastically done. Each was unique, relatable, and flawed in some way. We had a diverse cast of queer folks, manipulative folks, smart and sweet folks. Just across the board a wide array of characters. My favorite I think was Sunbern, the himbo cousin who was just a cog in everyone’s machinations but was just such a fun character to follow.

This just solidifies for me that Justinian Huang is a skilled, incredible writer to follow. I cannot wait for their next book, and will happily dive in head first. I would recommend this one broadly – if you read, this could win for you.