Reviews with content warning for Confinement - Heavenly Tyrant

Reviews tagging 'Confinement'

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

93 reviews

mgdmcc's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

While I loved Iron Widow, Heavenly Tyrant I could only like for certain periods. Going from the non stop, fast pace set by IW, HT I felt like the narratively was either yanking me between fight scenes or dragging me through political intrigue. There was so much world building that needed to be shifted and established throughout this book that I felt like between tension filled scenes of either abuse or complicated toxic emotions, we were getting hit over the head with repetitive scenes of progress and backlash.

I really appreciated character growth and time to dig deeper into Zetian as she developed more of a community and became more grounded in the stakes she was fighting for. Her dynamic with Qin Zheng was definitely a complicated and interesting one to parse through but after 400 pages I was feeling pretty done again with what felt like repetitive scenes of fighting and making up.

I really missed the dynamic between Zetian/Shimmin/and Yizhi and felt even further frustrated by the constant

betrayals on Yizhi’s part that left me not giving a shit whether he lived or died by the end.

Speaking of the end, wow. I hate to say it but the most interesting part of the book was rushed, underdeveloped, and in an odd way anticlimactic.

There were hints throughout how the adventure was going to go in Heavenly court, but what I had been hoping for was them reaching the Heavenly Court/Space Station and then the book ending, so that the hopefully the last book would be able to spend a good amount of time exploring that aspect of the world. Instead it felt like 300 pages had built up to a two chapter speedrun using Shimmin’s body as a McGuffin. By the actual end I felt frustrated with how much time was spent on the ground for so little to be spent in the Station.

Still love this world and hope for a third book, but still wish there had been a bit more focus on pacing and pay off here.

Content Warnings

ohmage_resistance's review against another edition

dark emotional tense slow-paced

Yeah, this book still wasn't really for me, but I think I respect what it's trying to do more than book 1. IDK how to describe this, but book 1 was more of a fast paced book that had a slightly more popcorn/dramatic/almostly thriller-y edge to it (it was dark at times, but it was more on the entertaining side of things), where this book slowed down a bit and focused more on politics and the difficulties of actually changing things, particularly with a revolution that seemed to be to be reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or other reforms throughout Chinese history. It still had the dramatic sounding edge to it (Zetian has the tendency to phrase things in a melodramatic way) though, which still rubbed me the wrong way occasionally. Oh, and there's still a lot of very modern/gen z sounding parts to it, which didn't bother me so much, but I can see that throwing other people off.

I did like the perspective on revolution and its brutality, although I can't really comment on how it interacts with/is changed from real Chinese history. So I guess know that there's a lot of very direct talk about communism and the theory behind it in this book. I'll add on here there were a fair bit of speeches and slogans and stuff like that, which were treated like they were brilliant by the characters that I didn't think were particularly impressive. They might also come across as preachy to some people, but IDK, I kind of feel like they come with the territory of being a (mainstream) book directly about revolution. Like, that will involve a lot of speeches, slogans, and teaching people about theory. If you don't want direct speeches and do want to be confused, read Rakesfall or something instead.

The characters, including the MC, continue to be more on the morally grey/unlikable side of things, which isn't what I typically prefer. Zetian in particular also spends a lot of time under the power of the new emperor and having both a lot of power

because she's the empress

and very little, because she could easily be executed or punished by men. She does actually make some female friends though, and gets even more committed to trying to improve the status of women in general instead of just herself. The polyamorous elements of the last book weren't really here much, instead there was more of a like, dark romance adjacent sort of romance plotline a decent ways in (adjacent because it was pretty tame/relatively consensual, all things considered, but I think it was going for that sort of dark appeal still), which also wasn't my favorite (I mean, I'm never really a big fan of romance/sex scenes even with wholesome relationships, and uh, this wasn't that). But I also didn't particularly like the polyamorous parts of book 1, so that wasn't a huge difference for me.

I got curious and looked at some goodreads reviews for this book, and a lot of people didn't seem to like the direction change after book one (fair enough), but seem to be going out of their way to find moral reasons to justify their dislike of this book (which I find a bit questionable) (the funniest was the people complaining that the MC getting a surgery to repair her bound feet was an example of the magically healing disability trope, because 1) it wasn't magical healing and 2) I'm pretty sure there were Chinese women who actually did reverse the binding of their feet...)

Content Warnings