Reviews - The Phoenix Crown

1.5k reviews for:

The Phoenix Crown

Janie Chang, Kate Quinn

3.84 AVERAGE

tcu3's review against another edition

3.0

emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

cerenaud79's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

mallorieborup's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

malices's review against another edition

3.5

challenging emotional inspiring medium-paced

revchristina's review against another edition

4.25

inspiring medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I loved this book. Great historical fiction with interesting characters that drew me in

kappafrog's review

4.5

adventurous emotional informative mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I LOVED this book! I couldn't stop reading it over the past two days. Here are some of the things I loved:

* Gemma's migraines. I have never read an author who portrayed so well what life with migraines was like. It was especially hard-hitting for me reading about how it affected Gemma's career. This quote really made me stop in my tracks:

Because the migraines would hit during the performance run, Gemma knew, and there would be times she'd have to cancel at the last moment, and you needed to build up a lot of goodwill in advance for something like that.

It made me really reflect on how much of my attitude towards things has always been about trying to build up goodwill for when I will have to cancel because of health. I never thought about it that way.

* The women of Chinatown in 1906. Suling, Madame Ning, and all the web of connections to other people they knew and looked out for in life - I loved learning about that. Suling and Madame Ning were such well-drawn characters. I wanted to see even more of Madame Ning than we got!

I was so shocked when she got shot.

* The queer representation!

I was definitely full of excited surprise when I found out Reggie and Nelly were the same person.

I have to say, it's quite disappointing seeing that a number of the lower reviews for this book on Goodreads are because people thought the authors were ahistorical with their LGBT themes instead of the earthquake. Did we read the same book?? The earthquake was a huge and traumatic part of the whole novel. And queer history is such a big part of San Francisco's history! This reminded me of how much I loved learning about that in Malinda Lo's *Last Night at the Telegraph Club.* While we didn't see much SF queer subculture beyond the main queer couple, we did get hints of that in Paris so that was pretty cool.

* The richness of attention to detail about music and textiles. It really built up the historical immersion for me!

* George - what a great character!

* The epilogue

with the painting descriptions was SO COOL!

All in all, a fantastic book that I just raced through! And I loved learning more about the history and finding out how many of the characters mentioned in the book were really people. Tye Leung was especially amazing to read more about, and I can see why the authors wished they'd fit in more than just a few mentions of her. What a fascinating history to sink into!

Content Warnings