A review by e_scapes
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

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

2.5

I really wanted to like this book. It had a good - if somewhat stereotypical - start for a YA novel. The poor orphan girl in a corrupt society passed the incredibly difficult test to get into an elite military academy where only the rich are supposed to attend. She excels in her classes and faces discrimination but by the end of the book she’s a hero. At least, that’s what I thought would happen. Kuang did a really good job of surprising me and she took the book in a direction I was not expecting it to go. Normally, I enjoy when the author diverges from the overused plot tropes and tries something more original. However, this book the first plot wasn’t the only thing that changed. It was the change in tone and content change that bothered me. This book started out feeling like a YA book. The characters were young and just as obnoxious as the characters in most YA novels (I’m not sure why I still bother with the genre). It started out by following many of the same tropes, so I expected the content level to be about the same as most YA books. But then as I kept on reading, the content kept on getting darker and darker. If this doesn’t bother you, you would probably enjoy this much more than I. It felt like the author didn’t want her book to be a YA novel but instead of upping the maturity of her characters she upped the maturity of her content while still having her book piloted by a group of idiotic teenagers. Also, a lot of the extreme content felt unnecessary. For example, the book started out with mentioning that the main character would be forced into an arranged marriage if she did not get into the aforementioned elite school. This felt like a good inclusion because it provided motivation for her to get into the school. But at the end of the book,
when it goes into the graphic detail of the mob rape of her classmate, that felt unnecessary. Or when it described a pregnant woman getting raped, her stomach cut open, and the fetus ripped in half. Or even the gruesome descriptions of the various ways the Federation army killed people - from castrating them and boiling babies and peeling their skin while still alive - this all felt unnecessary.
You could argue that all of this detail furthered Rins need for revenge,
to the point where she would burn a whole nation to the ground
but I think this idea could have been conveyed without such gruesome detail in a book that started out feeling very YA. 
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