“A Thousand Steps Into Night” is a Japanese-inspired folklore novel written by Traci Chee, published in March 2022. The novel follows Miuko, a clumsy, small town girl whose life is suddenly interrupted by the curse of a wicked demon that forces her out of her home and into the wider world of Awara. As the clock ticks down, our heroine finds that with everyday that passes, she loses more and more of her humanity and has to race to find a cure for her affliction with a cast of colorful characters: Geiki, the cheerful magpie spirit, a group of mischievous monkey with magical sleds, and deadly Tujiyazai—the main antagonist and a demon bent on world destruction with the help of Miuko.

“A Thousand Steps Into Night” was not a book I was able to finish. It had many elementary mistakes in writing and characters that I wasn’t able to relate with due to their often unrealistic and sometimes annoying personalities. These facts made reading and finishing the book incredibly aggravating and difficult.

Take Miuko for example: her personality is almost completely made up of being a loud, clumsy small town girl who feels stifled by her society’s strict sexist culture. While normally these traits can be given to a character and create a good story, this didn’t happen. Miuko has a tendency to constantly comment on these gender roles, but seems to have no motivation to change them or try to advocate for herself or other women in the story. Her comments end up sounding like her complaining instead of feeling justifiably angry about her rigid society. In the first thirty-four pages, nine have remarks from Miuko about her gender and how it affects her, making up 26 percent of those thirty-four pages.

Another fault that made this a difficult read was the explanation of worldbuilding in the story. Traci Chee has a tendency to hurl worldbuilding at you in large, rambly paragraphs rather than explaining it through context and shorter explanations. This is one of those elementary mistakes I mentioned earlier—telling instead of showing: which is an important tenet of writing. Along with explaining through tangents, most of the information explained isn’t critical to the story and is often things like place names, species of spirits and minor legends of unimportant figures to give context for a metaphor or saying.

While I gave the book two out of five stars because of the difficulty of reading and the badly written characters, I appreciated the character of Geiki—the magpie spirit from the introduction—whose personality and adventures were a fun side to Miuko’s main exploits. I also liked the general world of Awara whose medieval Japan-like setting was interesting to explore and learn about as the story progressed—from its cast of gods to its mysterious disused battlefields. And while not the best read for me, I do hope that someone else will be able to pick it up and fall in love with its cast of quirky characters and towering world.