The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang
3.0 Stars
6-10-2023

Sort of a Chinese, YA version of the Traitor Baru Cormamant. The author uses Chinese history around ~1900 as the foundation for her world, removes the guns, renames a few things, and adds in some fantasy elements.

I recently learned that the author was ~20 years old when she wrote this, and that made a lot of sense, as the book is oddly (pleasantly?) uneven and very melodramatic. The novel has major shifts in the tone/genre, as the story goes through three main phases. We start with an exceptional peasant girl who aces a standardized test and goes to magic academy (mehhh), then move on to a war story as the Japanese invade and her academy buddies and magic friends have to go to the front (quite fun, lot of potential), and finally we have a wallowy story of oh everything is so terrible wah wah wah Unit 731 vivisected my teenage crush how sad (basically unreadable).

As I said above, it's an uneven book. At 25% of the way through, I didn't see any redeeming qualities and it just seemed like a off-brand magic boarding school novel. At 50% of the way through I was enjoying it; I like the Fire-Emblem narrative move of disrupting a school novel with sudden real world events. E.g. there's a Draco Malfoy character who's her antagonist at the start, but once they're on the front lines together she discovers that "oh yeah, the differences we had at school really don't matter much now that people are trying to stab us with halberds. In fact, some of the qualities that made him an annoying adversary in school are actually quite helpful out here in battle". So this part is fine! And then we come to the third part, where things gets dark and we go through the fantasy version of every, single, atrocity that the Japanese ever did to the Chinese/Koreans. Also it turns out that magic has a terrible cost! Also it turns out that the Chinese Empress has betrayed them! Also it turns out that blah blah blah. Two major things go wrong here. One is that beyond a certain point this isn't interesting/enjoyable to read. Two is that I feel like this constant focus on atrocities that happened 100 years ago is kind of just psyching yourself up to be OK with doing your own atrocities in the present day. Like, maybe envision a new and bright future rather than continually leafing through your book of old grudges. So this final part is not good, either narratively or politically.

Oh right, also, this is a world that clearly has the myth and the symbology of dragons (e.g. they are on flags and such), and the world has mythical creatures (monsters, demi-gods, etc), **but** the world does not have any actual dragons in it. Author, I am fed up with your dragon-baiting. Stop blue-dragon-balling me.