The Rise of Kyoshi

The Rise of Kyoshi is a fantasy novel by the American writer F. C. Yee, published in 2019. It is the first of the novels about Kyoshi, a character from the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it was written with Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino.

The story is set a generation before the animated series and concerns the search for the Avatar, the person in whom the spirit of the world is reborn and who is capable of bending all four elements. Yun has been presented to the four nations as that person and has been trained for it, and Kyoshi has grown up in his household as a servant and a friend. When Kyoshi herself bends an element she should not be able to, the identification is thrown into question, and she and Rangi, the friend who has been training her, leave the mansion to escape the people who have an interest in the answer. The novel follows her search for a teacher and for who her parents were, and Yee treats the question of what makes an Avatar as a matter of politics and evidence rather than destiny.

The sequel, The Shadow of Kyoshi, followed in 2020, and both novels expand the history of the world of the animated series for an older readership.