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A review by elainabear
To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang
2.0
To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods definitely had some good things going for it. The world itself was intriguing and had a lot of influences from Western Colonization and the Opium Epidemic in China.
The writing was beautiful with long descriptions, and when I say long descriptions, I mean LOOOOONG descriptions. There are just so many metaphors and different figurative language uses, even Chinese idioms, throughout the ENTIRE book. The main character, Ruying, has these mile-long monologues in her head that really tell you EVERYTHING. Multiple Times, in different ways. To be honest, this kind of just made the book feel a lot longer than it was, in fact I was surprised when I looked up on goodreads that this book is only like 350+ pages. It almost felt like the author was trying to reach a word count minimum and a lot of the story just didn't seem to be moving because we were sitting in these monologues for so long.
I do agree with other people's reviews saying that the love interest being a colonizer is very disturbing. There do seems to be reasons for this decision of a love interest, however I felt that it could have been executed better (I won't go into spoilers about that but if you've read to the end, I can see what the author was trying to show). I failed to see how Antony, the Prince of Rome, really had anything that convincingly made Ruying attracted to him, besides being handsome(?) Although I don't really remember much talk about his good looks except for his eyes in this story. It felt very forced, and I couldn't really tell if I was also supposed to start liking Antony at some point, as it wasn't really happening.
The story itself did catch my attention. I am curious as to where these characters might go and I'm mainly more interested in seeing more of Baihu. I think that this author herself does have potential.
Thank you to Netgalley for sending me this arc to review
The writing was beautiful with long descriptions, and when I say long descriptions, I mean LOOOOONG descriptions. There are just so many metaphors and different figurative language uses, even Chinese idioms, throughout the ENTIRE book. The main character, Ruying, has these mile-long monologues in her head that really tell you EVERYTHING. Multiple Times, in different ways. To be honest, this kind of just made the book feel a lot longer than it was, in fact I was surprised when I looked up on goodreads that this book is only like 350+ pages. It almost felt like the author was trying to reach a word count minimum and a lot of the story just didn't seem to be moving because we were sitting in these monologues for so long.
I do agree with other people's reviews saying that the love interest being a colonizer is very disturbing. There do seems to be reasons for this decision of a love interest, however I felt that it could have been executed better (I won't go into spoilers about that but if you've read to the end, I can see what the author was trying to show). I failed to see how Antony, the Prince of Rome, really had anything that convincingly made Ruying attracted to him, besides being handsome(?) Although I don't really remember much talk about his good looks except for his eyes in this story. It felt very forced, and I couldn't really tell if I was also supposed to start liking Antony at some point, as it wasn't really happening.
The story itself did catch my attention. I am curious as to where these characters might go and I'm mainly more interested in seeing more of Baihu. I think that this author herself does have potential.
Thank you to Netgalley for sending me this arc to review