Recent reading

[luzula]

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (2021)
For book club. This is a well-written book which I enjoyed in the beginning, but which left me increasingly cold as it went on. I was totally into Zhu taking on her brother's identity in order to survive, and her experiences in the monastery. But I just did not care about the person she became towards the end of the book: if someone murders people (including a child) to further their ambition, that just makes me go "I don't even want to continue reading about you". And for Ouyang...that moment came earlier, when he put an incompetent subordinate officer from a privileged family in his place (that in itself I didn't mind) in a way that predictably led to the unneccessary deaths of a number of his common soldiers. Gah! /o\ That said, I finished the book, and there were definitely aspects of it that I enjoyed. But amoral characters driven by ambition or revenge just aren't my jam. One person in book club absolutely loved the book, four people more or less shared my feelings.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

Darn, that looked like a book I'd enjoy, but it sounds like maybe not...

[luzula]

Other people in my DW circle have enjoyed it, and it's certainly well written and has interesting gender dynamics! I guess it depends on whether you enjoy reading about amoral ambitious characters or not.

[china_shop]

That's such a good point! I never particularly liked Ouyang because he was seething with anger and self-hatred the whole time, which is not my thing, but I did like Zhu because she had friends and bantered, despite struggling against a tide of such overwhelming odds. Her choosing Ma partly because of Ma's empathy was an important part of her character, too. I don't know how different it would have been in written book versus audio -- maybe audio is a more passive, go-with-the-flow reading experience, or maybe that's a cop-out, but I think I mostly felt the shock of that action through Ma's anger and repulsion, and the ending didn't completely resolve that, so I'm curious to see if the effects will resonate through book two.

Anyway, I can totally get why you'd bounce off in a DNW-y way! (And I should have included warnings in my posts about it, oops! /o\)

[luzula]

I did like Ma! But I felt that her choice at the end to stick with Zhu didn't get enough narrative attention. Like, we never actually see her struggling with that choice. And for that matter, it's the same with Zhu's choice to keep going on the path she's on: in the beginning of the book, she thinks her fate is a matter of greatness or death, which makes me more sympathetic to her actions. But near the end, she stops believing this, and thinks that actually, if she wanted she could just go live a quiet life somewhere, but no, the (literally) cutthroat ambition is actually what she wants.

[chestnut_pod]

Ah well! I'm sorry this one didn't hook you (and sorry I didn't include the, uh, child murder in my review… it slipped my mind to warn for, but obviously that's a big one!).

Perhaps whatever SPC comes out with next, after this series is over, will be more up your alley. I have high hopes that the (apparent) great success of these books means many more in future.

[luzula]

It was definitely well written! I can imagine that if the author writes something else without this element that threw me out of the book, I would be hooked. : )