I read a lot of fiction by and about marginalized people, and a lot of it, while very good, feels a little bit like "This ought to have existed like 20 years ago". Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee both does and does not fall into this category. I feel like something like Dragon Pearl ought to have existed long before now, but perhaps only only so I could say "Not your average gender exploratory early YA/late Middle Grade novel inspired by Korean mythology."
Premise
In the far future, humans and a few other creatures, including goblins and dragons, have widely colonized space. Protagonist Min lives on the neglected planet Jinju with her extended family, all of whom are Gumiho, fox spirits. When her brother Jun is accused of deserting the Space Forces, she embarks on a journey to solve his disappearance, prove his innocence, and find the Dragon Pearl, a long-lost artifact with the power to control the weather and terraform planets. Her journey leads her to impersonate a cadet on the ship her brother left, and eventually leads her and her friends to a showdown on a forbidden planet, the solution to which relies more on compassion and creativity than it does on action and daring.
Gender
The challenges to conventional gender norms in Dragon Pearl are casual and persistent. Early in the book, Min describes how foxes traditionally choose to be female, but her young cousin Manshik "insisted on being male" like Jun, and no one gave him a hard time about it. Like, I cannot emphasize how cool this is: the foxes choose their genders! Which may go some way towards explaining how easily Min adjusts when her infiltration of the ship on which her brother served requires her to take on the form of a dead male cadet. She is initially uncomfortable with his height and deeper voice (no mention is made of the genitalia situation, this is a children's book), but it doesn't take very long for her to get used to it, or to responding to "he" and "him". In a book as trans-aware as this, it is unlikely that Lee did not consider the possibility of ongoing dysphoria. So I think it's reasonable to read Min as someways genderfluid, as someone for whom, as a result of both her species and individual inclination, femaleness is a deliberate, comfortable choice, but not an absolute necessity. Min's form is mutable, and we are told in so many words that turning into a boy is not inherently any stranger for her than turning into a cup or a table.
Elsewhere, it is not necessary to search and interpret. Min's new identity as Cadet Jang comes preloaded with two friends, Hanuel and Sujin. Sujin is a Dokkaebi, a goblin, and the nametag on their uniform indicates that they should be addressed with gender neutral pronouns. It is not clear whether the "they" pronouns are a goblin thing or a Sujin thing, but what stands out here is first of all, there's a nonbinary character, and second of all, the military in this world put everyone's pronouns on their name tags.
No fuss is made over any of this. Nonbinary pronouns and gender as a personal choice are all as nonchalantly inherent to Min's worldview as dragons, spaceships, and her own versatile shapeshifting abilities.
Magic and Science
One area in which Dragon Pearl does have a contemporary tradition with which to be in conversation is the blending of science fiction and fantasy elements. It harkens to the Young Wizards books and Artemis Fowl, both series directed at about the same age group, in the seamless, culturally normalized integration of magic into technology and vis versa, and the coexistence of different species who each related to the magic, and the technology, a little differently.
Most of the overt magic belongs to the foxes, goblins, dragons, ghosts, and presumably celestial maidens, although we do not see enough of the lattermost to have any real sense of their capabilities, but the functioning of the spaceships relies on the flow of "mystic energy" (explicitly analogous to gi in the human body) through their meridians, which can be messed up by ghosts or bad luck as well as by mechanical glitches or physical damage.
There is not such explicit integration of magic into every aspect of the technology. The laundry robots are just laundry robots, and aside from relying on the mystic energy of the ship, there's nothing magical about the onboard hydroponics, although they are receptive to being blessed by Hanuel's dragon magic.
Rick Riordan Presents
Rick Riordan Presents is an imprint of Disney-Hyperion Publishing, with the specific objective of spotlighting books from marginalized authors that Rick Riordan, and his editor, think will appeal to fans of his work. So far, Dragon Pearl is the only book from this imprint that I've read, but it absolutely fits that mission statement, and I felt like I needed to take a second to talk about how cool I think this project is. A successful white dude author putting his literal seal of approval on books by more marginalized authors that he thinks his readers will like, and thereby not only helping further their careers but get those books in front of his young fans - allowing his readers who don't look like him to see themselves at the center of stories, and encouraging those who do to immerse themselves in identities and perspectives other than their own - is exactly how publishing should work, and I would like to see a lot more of this kind of thing.
Conclusion
Dragon Pearl is as groundbreaking as it is necessary. It's queer, it's innovative, and it's just really cool. Come for the exiting space adventure, stay for the deeper politics and nonchalant faith in the reader's ability to handle complex topics without a lot of handholding and methodical explanation. Also it's a really quick read, because children's book, so if you're in that kind of "This sounds neat and I would love to read more, but I have such limited time and energy" place, know that this won't cost you very much of either.
Seriously: Read. This. Book.
