Review by jseicas - The Poppy War

jseicas 's review for:

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

2.25

adventurous dark medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

To start off, I did not enjoy reading this book. I liked the side characters, but interactions with the main cast honestly weren't entertaining, and the main character was not only unlikable, she was uninteresting. After the first half of the first part, I found a lot of her inspiration to be unclear and cloudy, and

even though this was partially taken care of through the narrative,

it didn't make the experience of it any better to read, or have it make sense within the character- at least in this book, the contradictions aren't addressed,

in fact they're just flipped at the end, which I bet inspires the second book.

I love historical fiction, and I think it's a great way to address and educate on hard themes (like war crimes and genocide) and are very important at making readers empathetic and making history have feelings. I thought this book did this in a way that was lazy and heavy handed, and failed.

Having this book so clearly based off the opium wars and the world wars was a great and interesting start, and introducing magic to it is not a problem; however, the way that the placenames were changed and yet so very clearly representative of real places does nothing but muddy waters and simplify things that actually deserve to be complicated. I think it was really done so that the writing could be offensively colonial to the island of formosa and the people represented by the hinterlands, be they siberians or mongolians or whoever. It was frustrating to read these parts.

Content Warnings