Shadowboxer

Thai Hard

Release Date: OUT NOW!

228 pages | £ 7.99 ( paperback) Author: Tricia Sullivan Publisher: Ravenstone

There’s a lot to love

about this YA novel, which draws together the stories of American Latina mixed martial artist Jade, Thai- based Burmese refugee Mya, and Welsh- Asian journalist Shea.

Mya is being forced by the sinister Mr Richard to lead him into the mystical Himmapan forest, which she can access through meditation but he can only visit with the help of a child guide. After she encounters Jade and Shea, the three work together to bring down Mr Richard’s criminal enterprises.

So many of the standard genre tropes – white lead characters, obsessions with clothes and boys, college dramas – have been thrown out. And the spiritual domain of the Himmapan, and the strange creatures that live there, meshes beautifully into Jade’s gritty world of cage fights. Miriam McDonald