Scan barcode
A review by leonwheeler
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-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
2.0
An incredibly bad ending to an otherwise pretty good trilogy. Most of this book was very enjoyable, if a little too historically parallel, right up until the last 20%.
The final battle between the Republic and the Southern forces was very anticlimactic both in regard to Rin tackling Nezha and the dragon and the revolutionaries tackling the Republican forces. Then everything went downhill very, very fast.
Rin discovers that ruling a war torn and famine stricken country is incredibly hard and then quickly becomes paranoid and insane. This culminates in her suicide and the handing of power back over to Nezha and the Republic - only now the Republic has lost nearly all of the leavarage they held over the Hesperians.
Thematically this was terrible and just thinking about it honestly just makes me mad.
Rin is somehow incompetent at running a country despite undergoing several years of schooling partly on exactly that. Kitay also seems to loose any semblance of being as intelligent as we’ve been told he is for the entire series. The message that Rin is more than she is stereotyped as for being dark skinned - more than just a vicious ‘dog’ purely good for fighting - her s swiftly reversed as Rin is actually shown to only be good at fighting and killing. Any anti-colourist messages the series seemed to claim to have are instantly undermined by this, especially as the person who ends up back on the throne is Nezha, a pale northerner.
The historical allegory, Rin being Mao, is also messed up. Kuang clearly doesn’t like Mao and so has to paint the revolution against western colonialism as not worth the initial death and violence it causes. Yet to do this she has to break the ‘reality’ of the story by refusing to give Rin a way out of the famine that actually did exist for Mao (soviet support).
I have a lot more to say about this but can’t be bothered to write more here.
I refuse to believe the same woman wrote this and Babel.
The final battle between the Republic and the Southern forces was very anticlimactic both in regard to Rin tackling Nezha and the dragon and the revolutionaries tackling the Republican forces. Then everything went downhill very, very fast.
Rin discovers that ruling a war torn and famine stricken country is incredibly hard and then quickly becomes paranoid and insane. This culminates in her suicide and the handing of power back over to Nezha and the Republic - only now the Republic has lost nearly all of the leavarage they held over the Hesperians.
Thematically this was terrible and just thinking about it honestly just makes me mad.
Rin is somehow incompetent at running a country despite undergoing several years of schooling partly on exactly that. Kitay also seems to loose any semblance of being as intelligent as we’ve been told he is for the entire series. The message that Rin is more than she is stereotyped as for being dark skinned - more than just a vicious ‘dog’ purely good for fighting - her s swiftly reversed as Rin is actually shown to only be good at fighting and killing. Any anti-colourist messages the series seemed to claim to have are instantly undermined by this, especially as the person who ends up back on the throne is Nezha, a pale northerner.
The historical allegory, Rin being Mao, is also messed up. Kuang clearly doesn’t like Mao and so has to paint the revolution against western colonialism as not worth the initial death and violence it causes. Yet to do this she has to break the ‘reality’ of the story by refusing to give Rin a way out of the famine that actually did exist for Mao (soviet support).
I have a lot more to say about this but can’t be bothered to write more here.
I refuse to believe the same woman wrote this and Babel.