The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, 2018)
★★★★★
The Poppy War starts off with Rin’s acceptance to and training at the most prestigious military academy in the Empire of Nikan (China), but soon escalates into war between Nikan and the aggressive Federation of Mugen (Japan). What follows is a retelling of the Second Sino-Japanese War, including a version of the Rape of Nanking. These latter passages are extremely difficult to read, with the Mugenese soldiers’ brutalities described as unsparingly as they occurred in real life (see Iris Chang’s book of the same title). As Kuang writes in her chilling essay “How to Talk to Ghosts”: “The Nanjing Massacre was the forgotten Holocaust of the West, is still denied by prominent academics, and I wanted to flash those atrocities into unwilling eyes.” It’s numbing to realize some will read this book and think the horrors described within are her inventions.
Rin’s story is modeled after the rise of Mao Zedong if he were Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Fantasy elements are woven throughout, including a version of magic that depends on the use of hallucinogenic drugs to access higher states of consciousness and very real, very destructive, very inhuman gods. (Kuang states she wanted to explore what might have happened if opium had not been a weakness of the Chinese.) Though I didn’t love any of the characters, the ways they struggled with their relationships during wartime produced striking vignettes—disunification while under siege, heroes being brought low, bitter enemies banding together for a last stand.
The Poppy War “is a fantasy novel, but it’s also a study in collective trauma, genocide denial, military strategy, and the psychology of dictators”—written by the author when she was only 19. As a first-generation Chinese American with little connection to my heritage, it left me reeling in a specific, slightly shameful way. There’s so much to unpack here: about my generation’s obligations to retell the past—to talk to our ghosts; about respecting and honoring trauma; about how fantasy can help us do those things.
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Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press, 2018)
★★★☆☆
After the rest of the world drowns in the Big Water, walled-off Dinétah persists in the high desert. Maggie hunts monsters while dealing with trauma and powers that turn her into a bloodthirsty killer. The story’s Navajo roots, Maggie’s solid characterization, and watertight prose make this a compelling read. The details of post-climate-change life add extra sparkle.
The plot, however, is convoluted. OP healing factors make for confusing stakes. Immortal characters are omniscient, except when it’s convenient they aren’t. The result is a feeling of unbalancedness: where intensely emotional segments are ultimately no big deal, but climactic key events turn out bland.
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The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com, 2019)
★★★★☆
A rich little morsel of a detective story set in an alternate, steampunk, supernatural Cairo. I loved the melting pot of Afro-Anatolian influences. The nuanced women were a nice foil to the slightly bumbling/self-aware protagonists, and the suffragette movement formed a compelling backdrop to it all. I only wished it were given more room to breathe. Would read another novelette about Jizzu and Fahima!
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The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie (Orbit, 2019)
★★★☆☆
Huh. Mixed on this one. I liked the premise of gods being able to speak only truths (and expending power or even dying depending on the impossibility of the statement, thus needing to hedge their language) and how it colors the narration, by an ancient stone who is also a god. The intrigues in the present day were fairly interesting. On the other hand, it was slow going, and I felt removed from the characters’ struggles and their geography. A few things contributed to that: 1) the second-person narration was jarring, especially when “you” (Eolo) had strong reactions with little interiority, 2) most of the story is told either through what the stone distantly observes of Eolo, or through long-winded dialogue, rather than direct action (drinking game: take a shot anytime someone “agrees”), and 3) Leckie does that thing again I hated in Ancillary Sword, where characters make sudden moral points that feel less like their own thoughts and more like injections of hers.
Consider me whelmed. Three stars.
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (Riverhead Books, 2019)
★★★★☆
Wow. A Mandelbrot set of a book, containing stories within stories within stories, but cut and sewn, questioned and re-questioned. Emotionally and physically brutal, but buoyed by snappy dialogue and tense action. Interesting to read this just after reading/abandoning Who Fears Death, as it covers similar ground, but with immensely more mature prose and better developed characters. Very unlike Game of Thrones (???).