A review by wardenred
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

challenging dark tense slow-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

 
Look at me and see the person who will win. The person who will rule.

My thoughts are so scattered after finishing this book that I hardly know where to start with the review. I feel like it demanded a lot from me as a reader, what with the rather dense (although beautiful) prose and the complex political intrigue. I think it will take me a while to let all the impressions settle, but I definitely enjoyed the experience.

As usual, for me it’s the characters who make or break the story, and in this case, all of them really shined. Even the ones who didn’t have that much “screen time” all came across as fully realized personalities. When it comes to the main cast, I found myself incredibly invested in Zhu’s journey from the very first page. I have a weakness for strong-willed characters who know what they want and are willing to step over the world to get it—and then somehow find themselves in the process. For some reason, I can’t help but feel this is not just a book with a morally grey cast but pretty much a villain origin story, even though there are a lot of characters who do much worse things for much worse reasons than Zhu, and even though she tries to rely on Ma, the one ray of unequivocal kindness and goodness in the world.

Their relationship was beautiful, by the way, and raised a lot of interesting questions in itself: about those in power and those who support them, about the value of kindness and how it might make things both better and worse or at least more complicated when aimed at the people with lower empathy, etc. It also made me remember how much I enjoy this dynamic: a character who wants the world while being aware of their flaws and a character who serves as their moral compass and grapples with the understanding that they won’t always succeed at showing the way.

As for Ouyang, his storyline was harder to get into for me, perhaps because it started to unfold when I was already so compelled by Zhu’s story and didn’t feel like taking a break from it to delve into someone else’s. I think if this book has any notable flaws, it’s this: the structural balance between the two storylines. Starting from around the middle, they criss-cross quite nicely, each section of each character’s arc serving to underscore something important in the other’s, too. But in the first half of the book, those intersections aren’t handled quite as deftly and, especially given the incredible density of events, make it hard to follow the story as a consistent whole.

Regardless, with time, as I got to know Ouyang better, I fell for him hard. His inner conflict, his goals that feel equally right and wrong, and his love-hate relationship with Esen were all the sort of draws I can’t resist. His entire arc is in many ways even more intriguing and complex than Zhu’s, and while I felt sad at the way it got resolved, there was also that great sense of inevitability, like all the details falling into place. I should also note that it was amazing how the book made me root for both POV characters even though they directly antagonized each other; I could never peak a team.

Last but not least, I very much enjoyed the discussion of gender in this book, both the subtler parts where there was a lot of showing instead of telling and the parts where the characters explicitly pondered these questions in their thoughts. Those were handled just as awesomely as the big themes of fate, duty and power, and were just as important to the story as a whole. 

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