Reviews - The Poppy War | The StoryGraph

50.1k reviews for:

The Poppy War

R.F. Kuang

4.23 AVERAGE

emi_tess's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous tense slow-paced

Strong character development: Complicated

alora0111's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous challenging dark emotional tense

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

jonny_riches's review against another edition

2.0

Initially, I found myself pretty frustrated with The Poppy War; I wondered why it wasn't classified as a YA book. As the book went on, I understood more and more the choice to focus on adult fantasy (which I'll talk about later) and some of the choices that confused me early on, started to make sense. I also learned how young Kuang was when she wrote The Poppy War, about halfway through reading.

This still didn't totally rectify my feelings for the book. On the whole, I really love the characters; they really awoke that feeling you get from YA books, that we're all so familiar with, but still so many books get wrong. Yet, so many times I felt it hard to emphasize with the characters, and understand the choices they were making.

The positives were also not enough to make up for the, frankly, sloppy re-telling of Japan and China's history — thrown together in a very George Lucas kind of way. One wonders how a book like this will age years down the line, and it honestly made me wonder if this kind of story is ever something that should be told through allegory. Is it too reductive to take atrocities of war and put them into a fantasy story? Is that something that can be done well?

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Spoilers:

Obviously Kuang knows a lot more about Sino-Japanese relations than I do (of the eight books she recommends on the subject, I've read one) but I can't help but feel that the younger her, who wrote this book, may not have had as nuanced of feelings about China/Japan as she propably does now.

She mixes things, which were perpetrated by many entities (the British introducing opium, The US dropping nuclear bombs, the horrifying testing and eugenics of the nazis, etc.) and boils them into these few entities; The Federation, Nika, and Speer.

At the end of the day, it's a fantasy story, but it muddles and confuses the history it's based on in some baffling ways — using the real life massacre st Najing to fridge your main character is craZy. And the aforementioned bad taste in my mouth, really comes back to Rin, and how she was written.

It seems our main character is meant to go on a kind of Paul Atredies arch, where she becomes the villain of her own story, but Kuang can't quite commit to it. It feels like we're still supposed to side with Rin, right up until the end — when she does a genocide. This is where I wish the future R.F. Kuang, who wrote Babel, could have stepped in and edited this book a bit.

There's so much wasted potential, to leave you in the ashes and horror of a character you loved, but we kind of miss the point and are stuck in this trap where our Katniss Everdeen is a war criminal and a racist, but we're still meant to sympathize with her. And I say sympathize, not empathize, intentionally. You rarely empathize with anyone in this book.

To really explain my frustration with Rin, I have to go back early in the book (to probably my least favorite part of the whole thing).

Rin is still pretty new at Sinegard, and after a bad fight with a terrifying and horrific classmate (which Kuang wants to redeem later) Rin is barred from combat training.

We spend a whole chapter commiserating with Rin because, "No master would choose to take on an apprentice who couldn't fight" but Kuang has already introduced Jiang, the quirky lore master who doesn't have any apprentices. The reader knows the instant Jiang is introduced, that Rin will study with him, but Kuang tries to dance around it and create tension where there is none.

Moments like this (as well as the horrifying atrocities they commit) make it so hard to empathize with any characters in the book. We know so much more, and so much better than them, that it's hard to appreciate any decision they make.

I wish I had a better way to tie this review up, but all I can really say is that I wanted to like this so badly, but I just didn't enjoy it. I may give the sequels a shot at some point, I hope there's more to love, because there's so much potential in The Poppy War.

meganestaley's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

sunflower_soph's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark tense medium-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

charlotte_d121's review against another edition

4.0

This is not at all what I would expect from the first book in a series. The pacing in this was so odd to me. The fact that this book spans multiple years and at times will flit through a whole season or two in a couple of pages was a bit jarring to read, but overall, I really enjoyed it and am excited to start the next one.