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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4.5/5
Pages: 544
Started: 12 August 2023
Finished: 18 August 2023
Summary:
The adopted daughter of opium dealers, Rin spent her childhood obeying orders, weathering abuse, and studying for the test that could get her out and away, all while witnessing the damage opium was capable of inflicting. When she receives an absurdly high test score and gains admission to an elite military academy on the other side of Nikan, she jumps at the chance to train and to succeed. Though the school is harder than she could have imagined, and though Rin's darker skin and country accent set her apart from her classmates, she remains determined, even winning the attention and tutelage of the academy's lore master, who understands ancient martial arts and the connection to the power of the gods.
Then war breaks out. The Federation, an island country with too large an army and not enough land, attacks, and the students at Rin's military academy are sent to fight. The Nikan armies are desperately outmatched. Rin must call upon her training in power and lore, at the risk of her sanity and the lives of all those around her. But the problem with power is that it makes those without seem far less important--dangerously so.
Thoughts:
This was such a cool book. It felt like a mix between An Ember in the Ashes and The Name of the Wind, which was a lot of fun to read. The protagonist started out as a very predictable and projectable protagonist, if without the usual feminine ya pick-me feel, but she was so determined and so not-feminine (i don't think this book even passes the bechel test; she's the only female protagonist and she doesn't even feel feminine, which is an interesting commentary on femininity & power) and she became power-hungry so fast that I would argue this book isn't ya at all. The violence is intense; I haven't felt sick to my stomach because of a book in ages, but a few scenes of massacre and genocide and torture in this book certainly got me. Kuang was not afraid to dig into horrifying scenes and horrifying actions, and I think the book was better for it. It was very long, and didn't have a round plot arc (another reason I'd argue it's not ya) but the flow of events did make sense, and most of the characters at the start of the book came back in important ways later.
The most interesting idea by far in the book was that of monsters & men--that the Federation soldiers could massacre the Nikan citizens because they didn't see them as the same species, and Rin had to embrace the same mentality (that the lives of the masses did not matter) in order to gain real power. I am very curious to hear how the play between human vs monster vs god vs nothing will continue in the sequel.