Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - Lei che divenne il sole

Reviews tagging 'Abandonment'

Lei che divenne il sole by Shelley Parker-Chan

35 reviews

ireadinbed's review against another edition

dark emotional inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Honestly this book is amazing.
I found that I felt the troubles of the characters deep in my heart. It hurt but I was so invested in the outcomes I couldn't stop reading. And honestly it was all very. . . satisfying isn't the right word but the ending was exactly what it was meant to be.

Would absolutely read again.

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macknificent's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional informative medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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fuguefire's review against another edition

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adventurous inspiring mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

Great book with fantastic cultural insight! I have a few gripes regarding LGBT+ matters in the book:

I found it frustrating that the main character continuously referred to themselves as “she”? Perhaps it is a cultural thing I’m not seeing, but it seems to me that the mc would have definitely preferred to refer to themselves (in their head) as “he”… obviously they saw themselves as more of a “woman disguised as a man” but there is a point where it kinda just becomes reasonable to use “he/him” pronouns because the flipping of POV made it very confusing. I understand if this is not supposed to be a story about a trans man, since the mc is only transitioning because of their own ambition, but it was very clunky to have the mc see themself as a man, refer themself a woman, then be intermittently referred to as he and her by the supporting characters

Please let me know if I am missing some aspect of LGBT+ Gender theory here, and perhaps I feel this way because I come from a western culture, I just felt like this one specific aspect of the book could have been dealt with better. I would also be interested to hear what Chinese tans/non-cis people thought about it! Other than that, I loved this book, the characters unerring drive for their goal, and the flaws that create in them.

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storieswithbee's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark inspiring sad tense

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

Genre: Historical, LGBT, Asian Literature

Age range: 17+

Overall: 2/5
Characters: 3/5
Plot: 2/5
Writing and Setting: 5/5

Content warning: *child abuse, violence, graphic scenes, neglect, poverty

The gist of my review:

This book has a very interest concept and literally THOUSANDS of incredible reviews… but I didn’t like it...

Initially I was drawn in with the ‘Mulan meets The Song of Achilles’ and the ‘bold, queer, and lyrical reimagining of the rise of the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty’. I understand where the Mulan references tie back to, however, I really can’t liken this book to SOA in the slightest. I more see this book resembling ‘Poppy Wars’.

I will give props to the LGBT representation, but the reason why I didn’t like the book was because I found it to be more of a history book, rather than this epic fantasy. I attempted this book multiple times, and eventually I forced myself to finish this book.

Characters: 3/5

The characters were all interesting in their own ways. By far, I loved Ouyang the most. This character was so fascinating from the get-go, but Zhu…! Zhu’s story started off so well. I felt empathetic for her humble and simple beginning and rooted for her for seizing the opportunity she took, but after she left the monastery, I was put off my how dull she became.

Plot: 2/5

To me there didn’t really seem like there was much of a plot. Throughout the course of my reading experience, I couldn’t really tell what the course of the novel was going to be and when I got to parts where the sequence of events became clearer, I just wasn’t amazed.

Writing and Setting: 5/5

In my opinion, the writing in this novel is what prevented me from DNF’ing. The descriptive writing was lyrical and artistically written. All the scenes and characters were described in such a visual fashion that I became absolutely addicted to.

In terms of POV, the story jumps around to different characters a lot. Although I normally like this about epic fantasy novels, I just don’t think it was done particularly well in this book. As I mentioned before, not all the characters that engaging and only some of them weren’t really distinct.

Thank you to Shelley Parker- Chan and the team at Tom Doherty Associates for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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gracewiley's review against another edition

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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