A review by fishy27
To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang

dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

 I initially put To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods on my TBR because the cover was beautiful. Then I reinforced my decision because it was targeted by racist attention. Then I thought about removing it because I heard some god-awful reviews from trusted sources. However, I decided to pick it up because I wanted to engage with the book for myself and come to my own conclusions. 

I can confidently say that I did not like this book–TIL I learned that I do not, to no one’s surprise, like colonizer romances. 

Mari has a great review that really outlines most of my thoughts, and for the sake of saving my energy and not trying to re-articulate well-written thoughts, I’ll just leave that here. 

A huge element of this story that was missing/unclear was Ruying’s motivations for doing, like, anything. I know that there is a challenge in East Asian stories to communicate the character motivations to Western audiences because of the cultural differences. That wa snot the problem here. Readers are supposed to see a conflict in character motivations (i.e., “for my family” vs “I am doing the very wrong thing [and probably because I am falling for a colonizer]), but that does not clearly come through. Instead, we just get a weakly written MC who just seems ,,, stupid? I hate to say that about an FMC, but truly, Ruying was infuriating. 

The side characters here are very weak, but the worst part was that the opium-addicted sister was the one who should have been our MC. Her morals were strong, and her story would have been so much more compelling. 

The romance was appalling. I never once liked the love interest, and I think that her childhood friend should have been the love interest here rather than the colonizer. 

Worldbuilding here was non-existent. Mari talks about this in her review, but the only possible reason I can think of that Rome would be the colonizers here is because Chang was looking for a European country with a mythology. I expect that, in future books, we’ll see more of that mythology coming to play as the “science vs magic” thing bleeds across cultures. I really, really hated how Chang handled that conflict because it made it extremely unclear when exactly this book was taking place. The colonizers have guns, but our MC doesn’t know what surgery is? Seriously? 

The author’s note and the text itself just feel like they were completely mismatched. From what the author said she was writing about, I thought we would be getting a story more akin to what The Poppy War was doing with a stronger focus on a romance plot, but that was absolutely not what happened. 

I will not be continuing this series, nor will I ever recommend to anyone.