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florendie 's review for:
The Burning God
by R.F. Kuang
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Holy fucking shit. Just finished the trilogy. I'm feeling so many things and I'm honestly struggling to separate what I think of the book as a work of art from what I think of Rin in this third book.
I’m so mad at her! I found myself relating less and less as she became drunk on power, killing without hesitation, seeing herself as a goddess one moment and a helpless girl the next. Her complete inability to take responsibility for the horrors she committed was unbearable. The way she used and discarded people for her own gain was painful to read.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe it just shows how brilliant the writing is. Still, some patterns felt a bit repetitive. And I thought that Nezha and Kitay (who is supposed to be the smartest of them all) were sometimes reduced to mere foils to Rin's arc. I would have loved for them to take center stage more.
I don’t even know what I expected from the ending. I knew Rin wouldn’t make a good ruler. I knew she didn’t want to lead, she just wanted to burn the world down. But still. Fuck this.
Kitay should have survived and helped Nezha fix everything.
And now I don’t know what to do with myself.
More seriously though, I'm going to read more about the opium wars and the Sino-Japanese wars because the trilogy draws heavily from them and I want to make sure I understand all the layers of it.
I’m so mad at her! I found myself relating less and less as she became drunk on power, killing without hesitation, seeing herself as a goddess one moment and a helpless girl the next. Her complete inability to take responsibility for the horrors she committed was unbearable. The way she used and discarded people for her own gain was painful to read.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe it just shows how brilliant the writing is. Still, some patterns felt a bit repetitive. And I thought that
I don’t even know what I expected from the ending.
And now I don’t know what to do with myself.
More seriously though, I'm going to read more about the opium wars and the Sino-Japanese wars because the trilogy draws heavily from them and I want to make sure I understand all the layers of it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Child death, Death, Drug use, Violence, Fire/Fire injury