He Who Drowned the World: the epic sequel to the Sunday Times bestselling historical fantasy She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor, 2)

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She found she couldn’t muster up much regret for the deaths of Ma’s father, or the two Guos: Old Guo and his son Little Guo, Ma’s unfortunate fiancé. Madam Zhang is another POV that I enjoyed reading; in palace cdrama you might find characters that look like her, but oftentimes they are painted as one-dimensional villain.

A gender bent Mulan retelling sounded exactly up my alley, but as we keep seeing, perhaps retellings aren't for me. Thank you Pan Macmillan and Tor Publishing Group for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review. With a certainty as crisp as shadow cast across salt, she knew it would always be everything she wanted. The book delves deep into its characters' minds - as well as the first one- so if you want something to be more fast paced and not spending too much time reading what people are thinking, maybe this is not a book for you.While I understand where this sentiment comes from, I’ll admit that I wasn’t overly bothered by the turn things took. On the plain the two generals inclined their heads in respect; conveyed and received the formal message of surrender; and withdrew. Who else understood what it was to feel something of this magnitude; to want something with the entirety of their self, as she did? Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband—and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map.

The political intrigue, character development and the relationships between characters were all so well written. She’d spent the greater part of her life trying to escape her past, and unpleasantly sticky feelings such as grief and nostalgia still filled her with the vague urge to run. An] important debut that expands our concept of who gets to be a hero and a villain, and introduces a pair of gender disruptors who are destined to change China – and the LGBTQ fantasy canon – forever. It was a voice for a closed room, velveted with suggestion: that though they were strangers who had only just met, perhaps they were moments from becoming as known to each other as two bodies could be.Mostly, the POV characters are a mess, with perhaps Zhu the only one who you might say has her shit together, and this is probably what makes them so fascinating to read about. Baoxiang's pain spills out of him and drowns the world in its darkness, it is a poisoning pain with a bitter touch.

But, additional scenes and a slower timeline honestly would have made Zhu’s final plan a lot more believable to me.Unlike Zhu’s chapters, there was so much sadomasochism in both Ouyang’s and Baoxiang’s that it was hard to read at times. Even though her path to meet her goal was bloody, she was determined to make a world where no one is shunned or ostracized for who they are. The characters in this book will stop at nothing or no one to get what they want, however cruel the situation might be. This feeling of missing out on something reflects the fact that lives are being ended prematurely in these scenes. At this moment, I can’t even think of picking up a new book because I’m not ready to move on just yet.

If the world can barely stand to let its eye fall upon a man as lacking as you, do you think it would accept you on the throne?She switched to one of the languages she’d learned in the monastery (but never practiced) and said very badly, “You can speak Uyghur, can’t you? While I do acknowledge that these parts played an important role in the characterization and plot throughout the book, I would have preferred them to be more off-page and/or much less graphic. The scorned scholar Wang Baoxiang has maneuvered his way into the capital, and his lethal court games threaten to bring the empire to its knees. It was the delight of power mixed with play, as thrilling to her as the tang of brine in her nose and the hot wild wind that snapped her banners and sent the grass rushing and leaping down the hillsides. Parker-Chan’s exquisitely wrought prose brings light and nuance to the novel’s immense themes of gender, power and fate.