officialashleyo 's review for:

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
4.0
adventurous dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
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
I'm so glad I finally got around to reading this book! 

It kicks off with a pretty conventional format of this mysterious girl finding a way to escape a destitute living situation and get herself enrolled into an academy where she can study and prove her worth. While this aspect of the story is not all that original, it does shine in a couple of ways:

  1. Rin's time at Sinegard highlights the power that academic institutions hold. They're not providing a free education to the nation's top students for nice altruistic reasons of creating a more educated society or whatever. These institutions work as a tool of Empire, and the number one objective of Sinegard is to churn out the best soldiers possible, and only in the way they see fit.
    "There are no shamans" was giving big "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" energy.
  2. At the same time, we get to explore some "alternative" ways of thinking that directly contradict the conventional education 99.9% of the students focus on, forcing Rin to grapple with the two.

I'm a sucker for a higher ed/dark academia-esque setting, so I could have easily spent most of this book at Sinegard and learning all the lore (lol) behind the professors, students, their families, all of it. But where I think the book missed the mark was creating too few stakes in Rezha. By the time we start to leave Sinegard, the tensions between him and Rin have become pretty minimal, so it makes a confrontation shortly afterward fall short for me.

As for Rin, they can never make me form an opinion on her. She is an aggressively morally grey (at best) character, and I think that could be a big turn off for readers here. Her inner rage and desire to prove people wrong jumped out basically from page 1, and made the subsequent events of the novel pretty expected. Once she is out of Sinegard and fully in the mix of actual war, I don't find any of her decisions really surprising. As the story went on, I felt like I was reading more for the plot surrounding her than her directly. And now, I'm both excited and a little wary about the rest of the series.
I can't help but wonder if her full-on abilities via the Phoenix will leave me wanting to see more of her exploring and finessing her own skill sets. Other than the few times her rage pushes her to the extreme, there's surprisingly little action from her side, it feels.
But overall, still eager to continue the series (after a short break - this one really got dark).
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