Reviews

"Learn to want something for yourself. Not what someone says you should want. Not what you think you should want. Don't go through life thinking only of duty. When all we have are these brief spans between our nonexistences, why not make the most of the life you're living now? The price is worth it."

Reread this in preparation for getting my hands on the sequel and it hit just as hard as the first time.

She Who Became the Sun tackles so many concepts and issues, you'd almost expect the story itself to get lost in the sauce, so to speak. But Shelley Parker-Chan's reimagining of the life of Zhu Yuanzhang, the peasant-turned-emperor founder of the Ming Dynasty, firmly guides the reader through Zhu's life, from her humble beginnings to taking control of the Red Turban rebellion in a bid to end the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. Zhu as a character is developed so thoroughly that, as a reader, I was able to chart every single one of her plans and decisions to an internal motivation or characterization. It's so heartbreaking to see how Zhu starts out genuinely wanting to be a good person but becomes self-serving and disloyal out of a desire above all else to avoid slipping into ignoble nothingness—a desire that, when you know how Zhu's life started a peasant girl in the midst of a drought—you can't help but understand.

On the other side of this war is General Ouyang, whose family was executed to the ninth degree as traitors. Ouyang pleads for mercy, but not out of a desire for life. He submits himself to castration and being given as a slave to Lord Esen, the son of the Prince of Henan, in order to carry out his family's revenge. But, as poor Ouyang has cause to learn, humans were not meant to be empty vessels, and despite knowing that his fate is to kill the Prince of Henan, his family, and eventually the Great Khan himself, he finds himself developing feelings of loyalty for Esen. But this love is constantly warring within him against the hatred and anger he feels for the Yuan, and the certainty that it s his destiny to destroy Henan and the Yuan Dynasty.

Another thing that I loved about Zhu and Ouyang is that Parker-Chan uses their respective circumstances—Zhu living her life so long occupying a man's role, and yet having certain thoughts and talents and perspectives available to her because she was assigned female at birth; and Ouyang having been castrated as a boy, his growth into a man forever stunted even as he still assigns himself traditional male cultural roles such as warrior, general, brother, and son—to discuss genderqueer concepts and explore gender identity. And my favorite thing about how Parker-Chan does this is that the way they navigate gender identity is distinctly through Chinese philosophy and ideology. The way Zhu and Ouyang interpret, describe, and come to conclusions about their respective genders would not be possible outside of this Chinese context. This book shows that for queer people of color, it's impossible to distance their queer identity from their cultural heritage, and that you can't map the queer experiences of people of color onto the queer experiences of white people.

If you love books featuring epic, well-researched tales of conquest that zoom in on the little details that build up the bigger picture, hero's journeys that somehow both typify and transcend the stereotype, and breathtakingly compelling but oh so very messy characters, pick up She Who Became the Sun. You won't regret it.