Reviews with content warning for Torture - Iron Widow

Reviews tagging 'Torture'

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

937 reviews

skthind's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional inspiring 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? Yes

4.5

i really liked this book! i loved the way it handled the mcs anger against the system and balanced it with empathy. the relationships were well written and i loved the polyamory. it got a bit fast for me in the end - i almost couldn't keep up with everything. did successfully make me VERY curious abt the sequel, though. also made me very curious abt empress wu - i may have to go read some nonfiction abt her now.

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scripturient's review

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dark reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
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

4.25

That was one hell of a ride. It is unapologetic female rage, which I really enjoyed, it is inspired by Imperial China's only female Emperor, which is also super cool, and

it has a love triangle that resolves into a throuple which was AWESOME

. I don't ever want to read that in any other way.
I felt the ending was a bit rushed, almost as if there was no real resolution at hand, so we had to go for more broad angry violence, which felt a bit empty. But overall a great read!

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fitchersbird's review against another edition

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adventurous tense fast-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

3.5

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melniksuzuki's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-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

4.0

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caeruleum's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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blacksphinx's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional fast-paced

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

4.5

This is the book that got me back into reading as a hobby; I devoured it in less than 24 hours. It's also the first book I'm reread since diving back into reading, and I was nervous. I've read about 250 other books since then... would this still stand up to my memory of it?

The answer turned out to be mostly yes! It doesn't hurt that I recently bounced off of two other YA-ish-female-rage stories and I could compare and see how much better this one is (even on a sentence level). I love how Zeitan is a wrathful, manipulative thing who is fueled by spite. I also loved how singularly focused she was on women's position in the unjust pilot system. She never lost sight of the constant disregard and loss of female life, and even was able to pull her gaze back further to see that yelling at individual men was ineffective, it's the system that is rotten. And yeah, there's some cheesy bits (a character snaps his fingers and goes yeeeees at some point as the narration says the audience "gags" for a performance, which made me cringe). The blisteringly fast pace is an asset, allowing any humor that doesn't land to be quickly moved on from. The final cascade of revolutions was just as cool as it was the first time.

It's also the only book I've read, YA or otherwise, the solves a love triangle with a genuine polyamorous triad, and I can't overlook how much I love that.

And yet, there's things that stood out and bothered me that I didn't think about my first time through. There's some continuity errors. This is supposed to be

a "feminist" story, yet every female character attacks, abuses, manipulates, or tries to kill Zeitan. I understand the point Zhao is explicitly making, that the patriarchy is equally upheld by women and we are not all natural allies to each other, but not even a single female friend? She has to rely on men for the entire story?

This is also yet another book where

torture is portrayed as an effective means of getting information out of someone, when out here in the real world it doesn't work.

The extremely high entertainment value I got out of the book outweighed the parts that bothered me.

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jacmuffler's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense fast-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

4.75

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inirac's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark tense fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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wardenred's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Some of us were born to be used and discarded. We can’t afford to simply go along with the flow of life, because nothing in this world has been created, built, or set up in our favor. If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.

For the first 25% or so, this was shaping to be close to a five-star read for me. I definitely took note of the writing being rough around the edges and how transparently beat after beat got lifted from the most prominent books in the genre. But there was so much soul here, so much emotion, and Zetian was so relatable in her all-consuming anger. For as long as she had that very specific first goal in front of her and pushed toward with all the force of that anger, I was absolutely hooked.

Unfortunately, past that mark the story steadily began to meander and loose its footing. I didn’t so much have problems with what was on the page as with what was missing. The worldbuilding was solid when it came to how the giant mechas and the fighters’ energies operate, but everything else? I definitely have more questions than answers. The central theme of the novel is the oppression of women, with all the attitudes around it largely lifted wholesale from history and dropped into a technologically advanced, futuristic setting with magic without changing shape much. And like, please don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not buying extreme levels of misogyny in an advanced setting. I mean, we all literally live in one, and I’m pretty conscious of what’s going on around me. But the specific shapes oppression takes tend to change and shift through the ages. Between the technologies, the reasonably well-understood magic, the war history, etc, it is hard to imagine that nothing about the society’s attitudes would fluctuate.

Then there’s the war against the giant alien things that is supposedly at the heart of the story, except the way it is presented, it doesn’t feel like a battle for survival. It’s just something that happens so that the evil men in charge can, a) entertain the masses with endless violent livestreams a-la Hunger Games (except without the internally consistent underlying reasoning the actual Hunger Games had), and b) kill and oppress women. If this is an ongoing struggle for survival and safety, it is very strange of the people in charge to literally go, “Well, we need to fight it in a way that doesn’t damage the fragile male egos and doesn’t give a single woman a boost of confidence, even if it means not using our resources to the fullest potential. This is very important. More so than our actual continued existence.” This is… not how these things happen. These things, to be realistic, should be more complex, with a focus on the war commandment achieving maximum efficiency on the battlefield with the resources they have, including training women with high spirit pressure as pilots in their own right, and the political leaders figuring out the mental gymnastics they need to teach the masses for that to keep co-existing with the biases they’re interested in keeping—and to be ready for some things to change shape while keeping their toxic essence that’s very much worse raging against.

Of course, I do acknowledge that the MC is a teenager in highly specific circumstances, and she simply may not see how the larger world functions. But that’s where my other problem lies: while I have no problem with Zetian being an unreliable narrator who is caught up in her own experiences and emotions and the limited information she has, I don’t think the narrative does a good enough job of treating her as one. On the contrary, it often feels like the book is trying to present the protagonist’s truth as the One Actual Truth, and I think the book grows weaker for that. It would have been great to have more layers to the world and the characters surrounding Zetian, to have them all display traits, qualities, etc that don’t neatly tie into Zetian’s narrative. It’s a tricky thing to achieve for sure when you’re writing in first person POV and your protagonist is an angry teenager, and I empathize with the difficulty of the task, but the absence of these layers kind of made the story start falling apart for me at some point.

What still kept me reading, though, was that anger that I keep mentioning—so relatable and so well-portrayed. I’ve seen reviews that mentioned how it’s strange that Zetian is so angry at the patriarchy yet doesn’t bond with the women around her, instead looking down on them. And I absolutely get where this opinion is coming from, but also, the way I see it, she’s in this place where she’s just so terribly angry at the oppression. She explicitly recognizes that other women—like her grandmother who broke her feet in the name of disabling beauty standards, or her mother who’s been brought down by her marriage yet considers it a pinnacle of happiness to see her daughter also married of, or the girls who act content with their lot in life—are victims of the system she hates. But the ugly thing about systems of oppression is that they turn their victims into accomplices, and when you get infuriated enough at the system, you turn your rage on everyone who upholds it, whether they do it because they want to, because they can, or because the system itself makes them to do. You just rage and want to burn the entire system down. It’s not fair. It’s not just. It’s how it is. I’ve spent almost three years feeling that type of anger every waking moment, even if it’s aimed at a different sort of evil, and it’s been incredibly validating to read a book full of it. I feel seen. I also feel both sad and happy that I don’t have a magical mecha.

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llyren's review against another edition

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adventurous dark fast-paced

Loveable characters? No

4.0

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