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juacmarques 's review for:
He Who Drowned the World
by Shelley Parker-Chan
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
The rare case where the second book is better than the first!
He Who Drowned the World is everything I loved about She Who Became the Sun, but with an even deeper exploration of gender and great new perspectives. What stood out to me the most is that, even though it delves into femininity in 14th-century China, we can still recognize the roots of those behaviors in the present day. We see gender non-conformance, someone wielding femininity as both weapon and shield (because even nowadays, it’s often overlooked), someone who despises a part of themselves due to how others perceive it, and even a woman who holds power only over other women—and exercises it tyrannically, becoming the villain in their stories.
I feel like Ma Xiuying is the one who sees the relationship between gender and power most clearly. And isn’t that another brilliant point of reflection? The woman who abstains from the pursuit of power is the one who understands it most deeply. What a queen! Still, I was heartbroken over Ouyang's story and had a lot of fun(? not sure that's the exact word, perhaps a sense of OMG he's pulling all the strings) following Wang Baoxiang's plots. I feel like their tragedy is that, as opposed to Ma Xiuying, they don't have a full understanding and acceptance of themselves and, therefore, can't live full lives.
All in all, my main critique of the first book was its occasionally inconsistent pacing, and I think that’s largely fixed here. That said, a few middle chapters could still have moved along a bit faster. But I’d absolutely recommend this to any and all fans of gender/history nerds like myself.
He Who Drowned the World is everything I loved about She Who Became the Sun, but with an even deeper exploration of gender and great new perspectives. What stood out to me the most is that, even though it delves into femininity in 14th-century China, we can still recognize the roots of those behaviors in the present day. We see gender non-conformance, someone wielding femininity as both weapon and shield (because even nowadays, it’s often overlooked), someone who despises a part of themselves due to how others perceive it, and even a woman who holds power only over other women—and exercises it tyrannically, becoming the villain in their stories.
I feel like Ma Xiuying is the one who sees the relationship between gender and power most clearly. And isn’t that another brilliant point of reflection? The woman who abstains from the pursuit of power is the one who understands it most deeply. What a queen! Still, I was heartbroken over Ouyang's story and had a lot of fun(? not sure that's the exact word, perhaps a sense of OMG he's pulling all the strings) following Wang Baoxiang's plots. I feel like their tragedy is that, as opposed to Ma Xiuying, they don't have a full understanding and acceptance of themselves and, therefore, can't live full lives.
All in all, my main critique of the first book was its occasionally inconsistent pacing, and I think that’s largely fixed here. That said, a few middle chapters could still have moved along a bit faster. But I’d absolutely recommend this to any and all fans of gender/history nerds like myself.