Book overview
Overall rating: 5/5
Genre: adult, grimdark fantasy
Synopsis: Picking up from where the Poppy War left off, Rin is forced to deal with the consequences of her actions and attempts to join forces with some unlikely allies in order to increase her chances of survival.
I know I emphasised in my review of the Poppy War that these books are dark but this book gets even darker. I found this one a lot more uncomfortable to read than the previous ones and there are even more triggers in this book than the Poppy War. I will do the same thing and list them in white so if you want to see the triggers you can copy and paste them and be warned. I would say even if you weren’t triggered by the Poppy War to still check them out because the Dragon Republic gets significantly darker. If you want specific chapters for these, I have marked them and I will be more than happy to send them to you as warning.
Trigger warnings (highlight or copy to read): genocide, substance abuse, nonconsensual drugging, war, child abuse, humilitation, torture, mutilation, nonconsesual medical experiments, graphic depictions of disease (including ones of children), starvation as a war tactic, onscreen suicide, onscreen rape, upsetting depictions of but offscreen abortions, mindcontrol induced self harm, self harm, just a lot of gore in general. (end of triggers)
Book review
R.F. Kuang does it again. I was a little bit worried going into this because I was scared that this book wouldn’t live up to the Poppy War, but I think it did and managed to exceed it. I haven’t felt so upset reading a book in a long time in the best way possible, and I don’t remember ever feeling so conflicted about the main characters of the book.
Kuang is a master at striking a balance between dark backstory that causes the reader to really sympathise with main characters whilst also portraying them as being so dark that you just can’t love them in the way you do with a lot of other books. I feel this way with almost all of the characters in the novel (probably except Kitay and Venka, I love them and would 100% die for them. Kitay best boy) because they are all morally grey in their own way. Her work with her main characters is some of the best that I have read and I absolutely loved the way she evokes so much sympathy from the reader whilst also making sure to never justify their actions.
However, I don’t know if the same can be said about the secondary characters. There is a clear bias towards her main characters but this isn’t really something that bothers me. I thought this was important to note because I know some people like to have a fully fleshed out cast of characters instead of just a main few, but I truly think the main few are done so well that it cancels out the lack of development for the background characters. Also, this could be chalked up to being told from Rin’s perspective because she can be quite selfish and self absorbed in places. I really think the lack of secondary development reflects the narrator more than Kuang as a writer.
Usually, in most books, you might not have a clear understanding that this is the bad guy and this is the good guy, but you definitely have someone to root for. I don’t know if I can fully root for any of the characters or any of the sides in this series. Not only are the main characters of these characters so incredibly complex, but so are all of the different sides in the war.
The relatively unlikable nature of each side and each character doesn’t take away from this book at all though. In fact, it added to how tense the book was because the stakes were set so high. By making them unlikable, Kuang manages to level the playing field between protagonists and the antagonists because they are all a mix of good and evil, so who is supposed to win here? Who would history remember favourably? By the end of the book I was still questioning whether or not I liked the victors and who ended up coming on top.
I mentioned this in my Poppy War review as well but Kuang deals with war in a way that I don’t think the fantasy genre has truly seen before. It is portrayed as being incredibly brutal and very realistic. Nobody truly wins within this war. Nobody comes out on top, and there are no winners, only people who lose less than the others. We see how war manages to degrade a person's humanity until they no longer see people as being people. Even as I thought I was becoming desensitized to the way Kuang writes about war and the consequences of the war, she will write something that just fully shocks me back into realising just how horrific the events she is describing are.
This brings me onto the magic system. This is probably one of the most high stakes magic systems I have read. If you are a fan of the Lightbringer (by Brent Weeks) magic system, you might like this one as it has the same appeal. You have to give so much just to be able to get the magic under control let alone use it. I love how original this magic system is, and I love how Kuang manages to link it to drug use without glorifying it. I usually absolutely despise the character-loses-powers trope, especially when it’s done at the end of the book so the author has an excuse not to write about them anymore (if you know me you KNOW exactly who I’m talking about) but I wasn’t sure if I even wanted certain characters to gain back their power. I couldn’t tell if it was worth the damage it would cause.
The ending of this book absolutely destroyed me. Throughout the Poppy War, there were parts where I was questioning whether or not Kuang actually knew where she was headed with the series but this book proved that she 100% did. It broke my heart in more ways than one. I couldn’t have predicted the ending but now that I’ve finished I see where there were hints that I should’ve picked up on but didn’t.
This book did go much darker than I am used to and I still can’t decide whether or not I was comfortable with it. I am kind of hoping the Burning God won’t be as dark as this on but I have my doubts. I can’t really decide how I feel about how dark this went but if you LOVE grimdark, this might be for you. If you don’t or you feel like you might be in a fragile headspace, I would urge caution before you read this. It is very, very dark.
Overall, this book was an astonishingly refreshingly read with an original setting, higher stakes than I could’ve ever imagined, engaging writing and incredibly complex characters. The setting was so well realised that it felt like I could feel the grime and the dirt in the settings. I felt physically uncomfortable at certain points in the novel because I was so disgusted by the scenery. Not only did I feel for the characters, I suffered with them, I cried with them and I mourned with them. This book was excellent and I highly encourage you to pick it up if you haven’t and enjoyed the Poppy War. But again, please be careful with the trigger warnings.
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