lady_elisabeth 's review for:

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

2.0

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I finished the book last night and woke up still upset about it. Despite the world building being a complete mess and the protagonist being kinda hypocritical and not at all the feminist badass she was marketed as, I enjoyed most of the book. Sometimes a book doesn't need to be good to be enjoyable. But that ending pretty much ruined that. I don't even know where to begin. The love triangle that actually had a good resolution with them all coming together, only for one of the characters to be killed off (probably) like 5 pages later?The fact that Yizhi is the non-violent scholar/healer type of the group and suddenly murders his own father? The fact that Zetian's whole motivation is to protect women and then she commits mass murder and kills probably hundreds of innocent women in the process? I won't even go into the whole alien war thing because I did not understand it at all. This book did not feel like a finished product, rather like an early draft.