So, I finished this about a week and a half ago and I had to sit and percolate on this one before gathering my thoughts to write a proper review. This book devastated me, y’all.

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang is a fantasy story that is a bit coming of age, and a lot military fantasy dealing with the harsh reality of war. Rin is a young girl from the country with little prospects. A war orphan, she’s been raised by guardians that are eager to marry her off in order to help their business. Vehemently opposed to this plan, Rin becomes determined to study so she can score high enough on the test to be admitted into the country’s most elite military academy, Sinegard. Once there she learns her path ahead will be tough–she’ll be ostracized by her fellow students and even some of the teachers. One of the only people to believe in her will be an eccentric teacher that isa a master of the ancient and mostly defunct art of shamanism. Meanwhile, the tentative peace between Rin’s homeland of Nikara and their old foe, the Federation of Mugen, begins to waver. Soon the peace will be shattered altogether and Rin and her schoolmates will be faced with the harsh realities of war.

The first forty percent of the book focuses on Rin trying to get into the school and her experiences once there. This gives us a very good picture of Rin’s character overall–she’s doggedly determined to the point where she pushes herself almost beyond her limits in order to achieve her goals. It’s obvious she yearns for friends, but having always been an outsider in one way or another, it’s difficult for her. And she has to constantly harden herself at the school and remind herself that she’s not there to make friends. As much as she does want friends she won’t let that stand in her way either. She has a chip on her shoulder from everyone constantly looking down on her and again with that determination, she wants to prove the students and teachers wrong, show them she not only deserves to be at Sinegard, but that she can best them. I love her tenacity but her stubbornness is both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. Rin isn’t a perfect person, and I feel like she’s such an interesting character because of all her flaws.

I also really love the other characters that Rin meets along her journey, both at the school and some of those after. I feel like they all multi-faceted and I want to get to know some of them more and I hope we’ll get to see some of them again in the next book. The parts at the school and the interaction between Rin and the other characters there were some of my favorite parts of the book. And, here especially, there is actually a good deal of humor in these pages.

Once we get to part two of the book the tone changes a bit. There were already some grimmer things in the beginning of the book, but in part two things take a turn. War breaks out and it gets real. School is not a safe haven. No where and no one is safe and once you realize this it keeps you, as a reader, on edge. The battle/fight scenes were well written and made me feel as if I were experiencing what Rin was during those times. I also really love the whole idea of shamanism in this universe and the way the gods possess a human and work through them is both intriguing and terrifying.

I feel like I can’t say that I enjoyed this book entirely because if I do then people may begin to question my sanity–because this book goes to some very, very, very dark places. But, I did like this book, very much, and I respect it because it doesn’t hold anything back and goes right into the heart of nightmares. The thing is, if you know the history that a lot of this is based on, specifically the second Sino-Japanese war and certain events therein, then it makes those sections of the book even more of an uncomfortable read. Because it’s not just fantasy ultra-violence for the sake of ultra-violence the way some grimdark can be…it’s uncomfortable because the atrocities written on the pages in this book are pulled from right from human history. This book is a stark reminder of the human capacity for violence and what can happen when some people refuse to see other people as fellow human beings.

Overall, The Poppy War was quite a reading experience for me. I don’t think it’s going to be a book that I can recommend to everyone but it’s definitely going to stick with me for a while and continue to make me think. 5/5 stars.

I have so many thoughts that I need to make sense of for this one. First of all, I'd heard a lot of people saying how this was like a mixture of Avatar and The Name of the Wind with a female protagonist, and in a way I can see certain similarities between the three of them. In The Poppy War, we follow our main protagonist Rin, a poor war orphan living in one of the poorest villages of the Nikan empire, who in order to get away from an arranged marriage, she decides her way out of that village is to enter the Sinegard academy, one of the most prestigious institutes where the best students, and the most well-off, of the entire empire go to train and learn to become the future generals, soldiers, doctors, and leaders of the empire. The main character does remind me of Kvothe and his struggle to enter the university, and she also has a crazy and unorthodox teacher once she enters the academy, but other than that, the similarities end there. Especially because when said comparisons are made, the first thing that comes to my mind is always the writing style, which in this case, is NOTHING like The Name of the Wind.

When I say that it was so hard for me to make up my mind about what I think of this book is because I feel like this novel was two books in one: there is no correlation whatsoever in tone between the first half and the second half of this book. In the first part we get to follow Rin and her struggles in the Sinegard academy, where she is shunned of course as an outsider and a misfit by the majority of her well-off classmates. She struggles with her classes, with not falling behind her training, and with a specific master, who teaches her everything there is to know about the history of the world and what she is mostly obsessed with, shamanism. Shamans, people who were able to commune with Gods and draw from them power that could be used, have been unheard of for hundreds of years, yet Rin thinks that it's possible to once more open the gate to the spiritual world and connect with the gods after her master makes her see that not everything that she's been taught is actually true. And then we have the second half of the book, where the characters are no longer in the academy but out in the world fighting a war for their empire and their Empress. And I feel like in this part, the characterization gets lost for the sake of introducing the worst possible crimes that could be committed in a war. Certain characters feel like they are mere pieces of chess that are only there to have to suffer the effects of war. A specific female character was merely brought back to the novel simply for the sake of having a recount of the most gruesome rape scene and female body profanation that I could have ever read in my life. And even though we do get a lot of political intrigue in this part and counter-attack strategies for the war, the characters lost their agencies somewhere along the way. I couldn't believe that the strong-willed and hot-headed character that I grew to love in the first part turned into this submissive shell of her character. She did not go through hell to just be physically and verbally abused by a certain character and take it without saying a thing. I also don't know if it is necessary to have 100 different ways of body profanation and gruesome descriptions on how you can dismember a body when just 15 would have sufficed to make a point of how vile and evil the invaders were. And I don't think that just because you get a section of a book with dozens of descriptions of said gruesome crimes is enough to consider this novel a "grimdark" novel, I honestly do not think it should be considered as such, especially when it only happens in just a part of the book.

I've seen a lot of people who reviewed this book say that the part where Rin is in the institute is actually the worst part of the book and I have to disagree. For me, the first part was the most captivating part. We get to follow Rin claw her way out of her very poor village, work her ass off to be able to have a future in life, and to develop as a character. That whole first half of the book, for me, was the best. We were also following the characters more in depth, seeing them interacting and how their relationships evolved with one another, and I felt closer to all these characters than I did at the end of the book, because for me, the last part of the book lost me as an audience. I couldn't connect nor care for the characters that I had started loving when this book started, and the ending didn't make me any more intrigued as to what's gonna happen in the subsequent books as an ending should do.

Would I recommend this book? It depends. If you are looking for an own voices fantasy novel that is inspired in asian culture, then yes, this is definitely a book for you. But beware of all the trigger warnings this book has, because it really has some dark shit in it. But if I had to personally decide based on how I felt while reading it, then I don't know if I would recommend this one. It was a good and unique fantasy novel, and from the ones I've read which have been asian inspired, this one definitely was the best so far, but I can't say that I cared much for the characters nor for the plotline. I really got around 80% of the book and I still didn't understand what the climax of this story was. I was hoping for something to blow my mind or for some revelation to make my brain go "yeah, this is why I stuck around 500 pages for, for this exact moment", and that moment never came. The ending was extremely underwhelming because it was what I expected to happen. Nothing came as a surprise, especially not after the revelation of a particular "enemy" was done only to the readers after half way through the book. Maybe if we weren't have been exposed to said revelation before, when it was revealed to the characters who that person was and what said character had done, I would have been shocked.

I cannot deny this was a strong debut novel with a strong female protagonist, and that when it comes to fantasy novels, it was refreshing to finally find a book that doesn't settle for the overused european medieval setting. But when it comes to personal preferences, I don't think this book made an impression on me. Maybe I'll continue on with this series when the next books come out, but as of right now, I have plenty of other series that are a priority to me.

ARC provided via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review


<i>Here is what happened: you called a god, and the god answered</i>

Have you ever read any Chinese or Japanese fairy tales the way they were meant to be read (rather than when a western translator has frigged around with them to make them fit a western mindset)? They can get seriously loopy and often the actions of the hero can seem quite arbitrary. The ending is nearly always ambivalent. While Chinese and Japanese mythology has always fascinated me (in addition to culture, languages and history - enough that I spent ten years studying it), I'll admit that the ending of those stories always left me feeling vaguely discomforted, which was no doubt what they were designed to do. I am not casting aspersions here; before the Victorians got hold of and sanitised fairy tales like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, those were deeply disturbing too. <b>The Poppy War</b> has the same feel as those fairy tales. Throw in a slightly more contemporary fantasy mindset, events drawn from real historical events and something of Kung Fu movies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in particular sprang to mind) and that's pretty much what you've signed up for.

I don't often issue trigger warnings but I'm going to make an exception in this case because the Rape of Nanking is clearly the inspiration for parts of the book. So <b>TW</b> extreme and brutal violence, inhuman acts of cruelty, casual cruelty to people and animals (in fact animals do not fare well in this book so be aware), rape (off screen but recounted vividly), infanticide, genocide, enthnic cleansing, laboratory experimentation on humans, vivisection, abuse of every kind, extreme and frequent drug use both voluntary and forced, and pretty much every other unspeakable act that the human race is capable of. Most of it is not seen in real time but recounted later or the MC is presented with the aftermath but considering some of the things I've seen and dealt with in real life over the course of various careers, even I found parts of this very difficult reading. A couple of times I felt physically sick and I went in knowing fairly graphically the historical events that provided the inspiration.

That being said, this is NOT grimdark. Not in the least. There is more to grimdark than throwing in lots of swearing and horrific acts of violence. This is epic fantasy drawing on some disturbing but true source material.

The Poppy War is divided into three sections and I feel like I read three different books that I would rate differently.

Part 1 - 5 stars
Part 2 - 3-4 stars
Part 3 - 2 stars

As you can see I've given the book as a whole three stars - nothing to do with averaging the rating for each section, that's just how I feel about the book. <b>Part one</b> contained so many of the things I love in a fantasy novel:

Disadvantaged young woman rescuing herself.

Success through hard work and intelligence.

Martial arts done properly – hell yaaaass.

Apparently loopy, contrary and inscrutable mentor who may well have his own agenda – seriously these are always my favourite characters.

Intriguing plot backed by historically inspired detail and political machinations that actually make sense.

And finally a good look at the fine art of military strategy. Soooo many authors making military strategy in fantasy novels contingent on ethics or decency and in terms of pure logic they have nothing to with it. The one who wins the war is the one who is prepared to calculated gamble and gamble big, employing tactics that the other side won’t countenance. I don’t applaud this behaviour but I am fascinated by it. I despise the watered down version of it we’re fed in so many fantasy novels.

Rin, the MC, is a war orphan, reared in an out of the way village in the Southern Rooster Province, by apothecaries who run a black market opium racket on the side. This is already an unhappy situation but when it becomes clear that 'Auntie' intends to sell her in marriage to man who has buried three wives already, Rin becomes determined to pass the Keju (a fiendishly difficult exam which is clearly drawn from Chinese history, based on the imperial exam introduced in the Sung Dynasty.) Her goal is to attend the illustrious but exclusive Sinegard academy - a military university which charges no fees to study but is difficult to meet the entry requirements for. Rin discovers that this is a token meritocracy, that she is continually at a disadvantage as a provincial girl with no martial arts lineage. Her low origins earn her few friends and plenty of enemies. Sinegard city is not a place for a country mouse, and under everything runs the black veins of the opium smuggling snydicates. Forbidden by the Empress after the second Poppy War, opium is used for trade, for pleasure, for pain relief and even it is rumoured by some who seek access to the gods and phenomenal, inhuman powers...

Sounds good right? Lots to like there. <b>Part two</b> is completely different. Long term enemies invade Nikan and the military students are given posts all over the empire to aid in the war. Due to certain occurrences, Rin is placed with the Cike - elite assassins ho make up the 13th division. And this is where it all starts to get a bit strange. Rin loses a lot of agency in this third of the book. In some ways this is understandable because she has largely had an academic understanding of war up until this point and the harsh reality puts her on the back foot. The problem is she never recovers. From an MC who has so much personality - not all of it likeable - in the first third, she now becomes a bit empty. A viewing port for the reader to look through. I wouldn't say the pace sags here but it does slow. Presumably that's because the events at this point are very frustrating. I don't want to spoil anything but there's a brilliant bit of misdirection here that was very satisfying to unravel. There were a few supernatural moments and strange beasts too. What's perhaps most annoying is that Rin stops trying to improve her hard won skills. And apparently she stops using her brain to think around problems too.

<b>Part three</b> is where it all comes crashing down. Rin loses all agency in this third and is just carried along with events right up until she makes possibly the stupidest decision I've seen in fantasy ever. It made no sense for her to go along with her commander's plans, which were insanely stupid. I think we're supposed to believe there was some improbable almost romance blossoming there but like so many of Rin's interpersonal relationships it's never really developed and so it just doesn't wash. The atrocities visited upon the Nikanese in this section by the invading Mugen are truly horrific. And just when you think it can't get any worse a 'Joseph Mengele' Mugen Dr shows up in a research facility. Honestly, a lot of this felt unnecessary. I'm all for not dressing up the horrors of the past but the problem with incorporating it on this scale was that people became statistics. The only way to really make your audience feel when faced with the sort of overwhelming horror that was the Rape of Nanking, is to visit those things upon one or two characters that you've made your readers care about. Instead we get aftermath and we get second hand account. Personally I would not have wanted to read about those things happening to Rin but the author lost much or her audience by shying away from it. Nothing really bad happens to anyone we care about where we can see and so the sheer scale makes us naturally find it too horrible to be real, even when we know the historical events that inspired it are true. This is not exploitative at all but it also didn't feel delivered with empathy. Add to that the fantasy plot line train totally jumping the tracks here and it became a weirdly lop sided novel where the tone grew unremittingly darker in each section while the characters became wooden chess pieces, devoid of their own momentum. The third section didn't work for me. I like an ambiguous ending but I just didn't find this one satisfying. I almost disliked Rin by the end.


<i>You have to believe it was necessary. That it stopped something worse. And even if it wasn't, it's the lie we'll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward.</i>

Kuang writes a fully immersive fantasy world in a really compulsive style. She has some interesting ideas and really captures the feel and essence of Chinese and Japanese stories. There is a clear thread here on the dangers of a caste/ class system, on oppression, on valuing human life so little and presumably also on uncontrolled self anaesthetising with strong substances. I really enjoyed the references to 'The Principles of War' by Sunzi, clearly lifted from 'The Art of War' bu Sun Tzu (a must read). Either she is a martial artist herself or she really did her research because everything about that rang true to my 25 yrs of experience, from the kind of teachers you get to the crazy exercises you do, to the difference between watered down varieties and the harder to learn but more complete styles. I loved Jiang (at least until the third section.) There is really a lot to like about this book. Ultimately the structure and the ending didn't quite work for me. There were also a couple of events that drew me up short.

<b>SPOILERS</b>

Rin experiences her first period at 16 and her immediate reaction is to seek medical help to destroy her uterus <i>because it makes her weak.</i> Um what? I stand by anyone's choice to not have children but seriously one period and that's it? Being a woman makes you weak? This is not handled in a positive way.

Jan, the combat instructor, says 'you move like a paraplegic.' I really winced at that. Yes there are some gits out there who would say that. I'm sure it was the character not the author who was being ableist, but it wasn't necessary to use those words. 'you move like mother f***** a snail' - equally insulting but not denigrating people who are wheelchair bound. This is just the sort of casual use in books we need to get away from with disabilities. Besides having taught karate to actual paraplegics I can confirm that the lack of four working limbs doesn't stop them being every bit as dangerous as as someone who isn't wheelchair bound.

Not really an issue for me but it was weird to see 'ki' used instead of 'chi'. Considering that Nikan is clearly based on China and Murgen is based on Japan, substituting the Japanese work for 'spirit/ energy' seemed a bit odd. Doesn't bother me. I have no claim to any Asian ancestry at all and am certainly not any kind of expert, but I've seen authors metaphorically hanged, drawn and quartered for less. Same goes for 'Kirin' (Jaanese Unicorn) instead of Chi-lin (Chinese Unicorn).

<b>SPOILERS END</b>

Overall I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. I love the setting and if it had continued more in the vein of the first two thirds, I would be slightly more psyched about reading the next book. Right now I'm just not sure. It definitely gets a recommendation from me as being Asian inspired and non euro-centric in setting though.

I received an advanced reader copy of The Poppy War from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I would like to thank R. F. Kuang and Harper Voyager for this opportunity.

Rin is a war orphan who works at her foster parents' shop and their main income is created by dealing drugs. Only just into her teenage years, Rin is offered a proposal to marry and bear children for an unattractive gentleman three times her age who has no redeeming qualities. She decides she needs to escape this presented and projected future and her only means of doing this is to study for the Keju - an examination where the top-50 students in the country that pass the test can train at the military educational establishment set in the empire's capital. Surprising everyone apart from herself she is successful and then whisked away by her tutor to the city and this is where Rin's adventure really starts.

Although the college sections are similar in design and structure to those depicted within novels such as The Name of the Wind and The Wizard of Earthsea, The Poppy War has a lot more in common with Anthony Ryan's Blood Song. This is a dark, brutal, gruesome and occasionally uncomfortable book to experience so readers should not think that because it features a school environment with best friends, bullies, and coming of age experiences that this is dumbed down like some fantasy adventures that feature such tropes.

The Poppy War is inspired by China's bloody 20th-century history and parallels between segments here and real events can be seen at certain points. The oriental take on fantasy is something that has intrigued me since I read Fonda Lee's - Jade City and similar to that tale Kuang's debut is complex, insightful, well-crafted and features certain characters who kick-ass at martial arts. The world building here is sublime, as is the depth of the nations history, religions and practices. There were many ways the author engineered the intricate details of her created world but my personal favourite was when the myths of the Trifecta were presented in the form of a shadow puppet show.

The characterisation and character development employed throughout this novel are exquisite. Written in the third person perspective, Rin is the only point of view character that we follow and to say that her character and personality change throughout the course of the narrative is an understatement. She is an excellent protagonist and shortly she may be mentioned alongside genre-defining characters such as Kvothe and Vaelin. There is quite a sizeable dramatis personae and too many standout characters to mention in this review. Notable mentions go to Jiang (the Lore master who might just be a little bit insane), Nezha (Rin's rival who is the beautiful son of a warlord and who should have a glorious military career), and Altan (the college's finest student who excels in all aspects and has never lost a fight). Also, the Cike are brilliant. They are almost like this worlds version of the X-Men.

Approximately the first half of the book is set in the school where students learn about five subjects including strategy, lore, and martial arts training. Three years later we reach the second half of The Poppy War which features skirmishes, battles, political indecision and some of the grimmest and most shocking scenes I've come across for a long time. One moment is particular stands out as being on par with the nightmare that was the hammer scene from Anna Stephen's Godblind. This story features plenty of deaths as well as torture, drug use, mutilation, implied rape, grotesque monsters and malevolent gods. The first third of the book doesn't really present this sort of darkness and despondency so I thought I'd make it clear in my review that this is a story that is very adult in nature. A good percentage of destruction, later on, is generated from this worlds magic where certain vessels can be assigned the power of the gods and wield it for their own means. As I'm sure you can imagine, this leads to ridiculously overpowered players that then can lead to complete madness.

2017's debut fantasy releases were some of the finest of recent years and it's great to know that Kuang has picked up the baton and is carrying on the trend and leading the charge in 2018. I can safely say that this will be the finest debut of 2018 and I'd be surprised if it isn't one of the top 3 books of the year full stop. Spectacular, masterclass, brilliant, awesome... All the complimentary buzzwords you can imagine don't quite do The Poppy War justice for how amazing it is. The only very minor criticism I have is that on the cover artwork Rin has a bow and I can't remember her using such a weapon in the book. That's my only negative. If you like dark adult fantasy then check out this masterpiece by grimdark's newest and perhaps darkest daughter.

That was seriously impressive; I knew I needed to read this as soon as I saw the brilliant cover. The book has also garnered a serious amount of buzz and as such I was beyond thrilled to have the chance to read this early. I was then a bit apprehensive when the first reviews came in and they all emphasized the dark nature of this book - I usually like my fantasy to be not super violent. And don't get me wrong, this book (especially its second half) is beyond brutal - but it is so well-written that it was worth it. The language used worked wonderfully for me - R. F. Kuang manages to create a world so immersive that I came up breathless in-between the tensest scenes.

The book follows in close third person narration Rin, a war orphan who manages through sheer willpower to ace the test that ensures her place at Sinegard, an elite military school. There she is an outsider, too dark-skinned and poor to be taken seriously, when she realizes she has an affinity for shamanism. This book moves at a serious breakneck speed and packs as much story into one book as other authors might pack into three - and I was glad for that. The author handles her story so adeptly that I was never bored or confused, while also filling the book to the brim with characters that feel real. They are sparingly, but well characterised and I could always remember who was who and what there motivations were: I found this highly impressive (I often struggle with remembering names in books with casts this huge).

There are some slight problems I have with this book; for one the first and the second half have vastly different tones and as such do not quite feel like a coherent whole. There were also some sentences that conveyed stereotypes in a way that felt unquestioned - and this is a problem in a book that so clearly mirrors real-world history. I do hope that this will be a major theme in the next two books in the series though (the ending seems to indicate this) - which I just cannot wait to read.

Overall, a damn impressive debut from an author I will have to keep an eye out for. Also, I need the next two books as soon as possible. Do read this if you like fantasy at all (but beware of the dark content).

I received an advanced reader copy of The Poppy War from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I would like to thank R. F. Kuang and Harper Voyager for this opportunity.

Rin is a war orphan who works at her foster parents’ shop and their main income is created by dealing drugs. Only just into her teenage years, Rin is offered a proposal to marry and bear children for an unattractive gentleman three times her age who has no redeeming qualities. She decides she needs to escape this presented and projected future and her only means of doing this is to study for the Keju – an examination where the top-50 students in the country that pass the test can train at the military educational establishment set in the empire’s capital. Surprising everyone apart from herself she is successful and then whisked away by her tutor to the city and this is where Rin’s adventure really starts.

Although the college sections are similar in design and structure to those depicted within novels such as The Name of the Wind and The Wizard of Earthsea, The Poppy War has a lot more in common with Anthony Ryan’s Blood Song. This is a dark, brutal, gruesome and occasionally uncomfortable book to experience so readers should not think that because it features a school environment with best friends, bullies, and coming of age experiences that this is dumbed down like some fantasy adventures that feature such tropes.

The Poppy War is inspired by China’s bloody 20th-century history and parallels between segments here and real events can be seen at certain points. The oriental take on fantasy is something that has intrigued me since I read Fonda Lee’s – Jade City and similar to that tale Kuang’s debut is complex, insightful, well-crafted and features certain characters who kick-ass at martial arts. The world building here is sublime, as is the depth of the nations history, religions and practices. There were many ways the author engineered the intricate details of her created world but my personal favourite was when the myths of the Trifecta were presented in the form of a shadow puppet show.

The characterisation and character development employed throughout this novel are exquisite. Written in the third person perspective, Rin is the only point of view character that we follow and to say that her character and personality change throughout the course of the narrative is an understatement. She is an excellent protagonist and shortly she may be mentioned alongside genre-defining characters such as Kvothe and Vaelin. There is quite a sizeable dramatis personae and too many standout characters to mention in this review. Notable mentions go to Jiang (the Lore master who might just be a little bit insane), Nezha (Rin’s rival who is the beautiful son of a warlord and who should have a glorious military career), and Altan (the college’s finest student who excels in all aspects and has never lost a fight). Also, the Cike are brilliant. They are almost like this worlds version of the X-Men.

Approximately the first half of the book is set in the school where students learn about five subjects including strategy, lore, and martial arts training. Three years later we reach the second half of The Poppy War which features skirmishes, battles, political indecision and some of the grimmest and most shocking scenes I’ve come across for a long time. One moment is particular stands out as being on par with the nightmare that was the hammer scene from Anna Stephen’s Godblind. This story features plenty of deaths as well as torture, drug use, mutilation, implied rape, grotesque monsters and malevolent gods. The first third of the book doesn’t really present this sort of darkness and despondency so I thought I’d make it clear in my review that this is a story that is very adult in nature. A good percentage of destruction, later on, is generated from this worlds magic where certain vessels can be assigned the power of the gods and wield it for their own means. As I’m sure you can imagine, this leads to ridiculously overpowered players that then can lead to complete madness.

2017’s debut fantasy releases were some of the finest of recent years and it’s great to know that Kuang has picked up the baton and is carrying on the trend and leading the charge in 2018. I can safely say that this will be the finest debut of 2018 and I’d be surprised if it isn’t one of the top 3 books of the year full stop. Spectacular, masterclass, brilliant, awesome… All the complimentary buzzwords you can imagine don’t quite do The Poppy War justice for how amazing it is. The only very minor criticism I have is that on the cover artwork Rin has a bow and I can’t remember her using such a weapon in the book. That’s my only negative. If you like dark adult fantasy then check out this masterpiece by grimdark’s newest and perhaps darkest daughter.

This book is a journey.

It's Rin's journey: from war orphan, to boarding school, to soldier in a brutal war. But it's also got huge narrative range: from bantering team dynamics to wrenching horror.

Because this story is dark, especially after the first 1/3. It has a strong point of view and something to say about what war and violence do to people, countries, soldiers, civilians, children. And while it is not dark for the sake of being shocking, it's modeled after the second Sino-Japanese war, which if you're not familiar with, I recommend that you look up before reading. There is brutal violence described on page, and you should decide before reading if that's something you are up for.

But back to the story!

THE POPPY WAR has characters you root for and hate. And there are characters who I began to love with a single line. The first of which is Jiang, the Lore Master at Rin's school. While I found the start of the book a tiny bit slow, the minute I met Jiang, I had a huge smile on my face. Even as there are very dark moments in the story, there's also so many fun moments. (Rin sees magic for the first time, and has the most relatable reaction: "What the fuck?")

The magic system feels terrifying and huge and awe inspiring and fresh. I love the way this book conceives of gods and power and how it ties that into war. And there’s an interesting sense of fate or inevitability. But at the same time, characters are held responsible and are always (explicitly, textually) agents in their own stories.

Finally, I found the writing very accessible. It's a heavy book, but I read it in just a few days, because it's so compulsively readable. (And quotable - I don't often highlight quotes in books, but I found myself doing it often here. Both with the banter and with the descriptions).

There’s a certain economy to the language - a rhythm.

Everything can change in a single sentence. Everything does.

This book is absolutely incredible it is about girl who is a war orphan. The orphan Rin makes a decision to try and get into sinegard a school which helps train the army and their commander for the warfare they are going to inevitably be part of. The two side have been fighting for decades and these wars have been terrible and had brutal outcomes for its world and its people. Some people are able to call upon the Gods for help but it is costly. I loved the main character Rin right from the get go. I loved how the author incorporated the Gods on the story I think it was very well done and something I haven’t seen done this well. I think the author has done an amazing job in making you really root for these characters by showing you what these characters are willing to do to succeed. This world is brutal and the author doesn’t hold back on providing a rich history that shows the deep rooted tensions between these two sides. The political warfare in this had me overcome with disbelief with the lengths these side would go to to win. I have never read a book that shows how truly cruel people can be especially in war. I think it is the perfect blend between The Name of The Wind and Game of Thrones two of my favourite fantasy books. I can’t wait to buy a physical copy when it is released. I completely loved it and it is now one of my favourite fantasy books.

Content Warnings for abuse, rape, body horror, self-harm, drug use, graphic violence and depictions of death, and genocide.

I received an e-arc of the Poppy War from HarperFiction UK in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to them, and to the author, for providing me with this beautiful tale of relentless misery.

The Poppy War follows Fang Runin, or Rin, a war orphan from a remote southern province of the Nikara empire. Growing up in an abusive foster environment, with no prospects except a forced marriage to a man much older than her, Rin instead pins her hopes on the Keju, an examination which, if she passes, could propel her into an elite school and into the empire’s ruling classes. In fact, Rin has her eye on the best of these schools, the military Sinegard Academy. Throwing everything she has at the examination – including self-harm as a study aid – Rin aces the test, but in doing so launches herself into a world where being a dark-skinned, impoverished peasant girl makes it nearly impossible to survive. While working herself to the bone to overcome the prejudices and barriers set against her, she draws the notice of Jiang, the enigmatic tutor whose “Lore” classes are a running joke among students for the fact he never actually turns up to teach them anything. It turns out that Lore covers the rare art of Shamanism, for which Rin has an aptitude, and that the powers she wields are tied to the whims of extraordinarily dangerous gods, requiring a great deal of training and self-control to even survive.

If this is all sounding like a dark but classic iteration of the “kid at fighting magic school” trope so far, it doesn’t stay that way. Throughout this first part of the novel, Kuang is carefully weaving in strands of recent history and current events about the Nikara, and their eastern neighbours, the Mugen Federation. Recent wars between the two nations have left Nikara precariously in control of its own territory for now, but at an immensely high cost – to win the second Poppy War, Nikara’s generals allowed Mugen to take control of the island of Speer, a Nikaran colony whose population was racially and culturally distinct from the rest of the empire. Mugen murdered every single person on this island, an action which drew the attentions of Hesperia (this setting’s equivalent of “The West”) and led to their assisting Nikara against Mugen, on the condition that the sale of opium be allowed in Nikara’s territory. Nikara also, apparently, drew on the assistance of three divinely-blessed humans, but of these three, only the Empress remains, and any supernatural element to her power has since been greatly downplayed. In narrative terms, all of these historical elements come crashing to the fore just before the book’s halfway mark, and the scale of the story suddenly becomes much larger.

I should note that I didn’t love this book immediately. The first couple of chapters felt rushed, and the style in which information was being conveyed seemed oddly disjointed. I think a large part of this was getting used to Kuang’s style, which is very matter-of-fact and makes use of plenty of time skips when the narrative requires, particularly in the first section. This means we are thrown immediately into an almost montage-style sequence of Rin preparing for the Keju, as well as interacting with characters who we immediately suspect are not actually going to be important once she inevitably gets into school. However, once the book reaches Sinegard the style stopped being an issue for me, and I wouldn’t have wanted the narrative to spend any more time on Rin’s preparation than it did. I’m just glad I didn’t judge this book too early and dismiss it accordingly, because it gets much better!

The Poppy War also gets extremely dark, with a consistent escalation of violence and war which mirror and complicate Rin’s personal journey and her relationship with the immensely destructive divine forces to which she potentially has access. Once the Mugen Federation attacks, Rin and her classmates have their education come to an early, brutal end and are thrown immediately into the war (this leaves a fair bit of unfinished business behind, which is realistic but disappointing to those of us who would have liked to see some serious payoff of the feud between Rin and weapons master Jun). Kuang doesn’t pull her punches in describing the effects of the violence, particularly when it comes to the results of more technologically advanced weaponry used by the Mugen. However, the brutality in this section is nothing compared to the last 20% of the book, where atrocities strongly reminiscent of events in the Second Sino-Japanese war and World War 2 come into play. This is, of course, hard to read, but it didn’t feel gratuitous, and there were certainly plot relevant reasons for why Rin had to see the utter brutality of the Mugen invasion in order to shape her final actions and the story’s grim but fitting conclusion.

In terms of setting, the Nikara Empire and the Mugen Federation draw extremely heavily on China and Japan respectively, and particularly on events around the late 19th and early 20th century. Again, early on I was sceptical about the extent to which elements were going to be wholesale lifted from the real world: in chapter two, for example, Rin’s introduction to the big city of Sinegard is conducted through anecdotes and instances of selfishness and deception which were identical to incidents from 21st century China. It’s rather jarring to have a fantasy city defined through a character recounting folk wisdom which is transparently based on legal precedents from 2006 Nanjing! This also got less frustrating as the book went on, and there was plenty of blending of different historical points and introduction of new elements (or, perhaps, just a lot of things I didn’t recognise – my knowledge of pre-1950 Chinese history is patchy) which stopped things from feeling stale, but a couple of the big set pieces – particularly, as noted, in the last part of the book – drew a great deal from recognisable historical events.

I left The Poppy War with unanswered questions about the effects of these parallels. On the one hand, I think it makes the use of brutal scenes less questionable: whatever else you may feel about the book’s most difficult moments, you can’t argue that they are unrealistic because events like the Rape of Nanjing really did happen, in our world. On the other hand, however, I never shook off the discomfort of characters discussing other races in the book as “not human” or “primitive”, especially when it came to the Speerlies, who have very little voice in the book beyond two troubled, brutalised characters. What does it mean to have a Han Chinese-coded character casually discuss the primitiveness and expendability of a race who are recognisably (though less directly coded as) Aboriginal Taiwanese? And for those Aboriginal Taiwanese characters to apparently have crimson eyes as a racial trait? To be clear, obviously the author does not come down on the side of tactical genocide and racism just because some of her characters normalise it, but having racial dynamics which are almost-but-not-quite real world felt like it pushed some of this material into an odd grey area where characters’ use of unexamined stereotypes became acceptable without being challenged to the extent I’d have liked to see. Then again, none of the characters in The Poppy War are good people, so expecting them to react to fantasy-world dehumanisation in a way which punches back against real-world racism is a rather tall order, and probably an unfair criticism.

This certainly isn’t going to be a book for everyone, and although I found it a compelling read after a few chapters, I still have some reservations about what I’ve just read. However, if you have the stomach for it, the Poppy War is an extremely rewarding, if grim tale, whose parallels with real-world events makes its brutality difficult to dismiss.

This was one of my anticipated releases of this year; unfortunately this one just didn't work for me. It sounded like something I'd love as it is inspired by East Asian and has a focus on military strategy but somewhere in the execution it fell flat for me. In some ways it read like a YA book to me but from the content I would say that this is more aimed at adults. This book is not for the faint hearted; it contains violence, rape, self-harm, genital mutilation and drug abuse to name a few things. This is a dark book and it doesn't pull any punches, so be aware of that going into it. I think the military elements of this book was well done and the world building is good. I never felt bogged down by the information provided and I enjoyed finding out more about this world.


I think the main issue I had was with the characters. Yes they are well written but I wasn't invested in them and consequently felt detached from the story. One thing that bugged me was that Rin picked things up so quickly, despite the fact that she started of with very little training. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it frustrated me in this book. I get it, she works hard but I just can't get my head around how she does it so quickly. In general I think the characters were lacking a little depth and were a little inconsistent. Although I think the author did a good job at developing the characters throughout the darker parts of this book.


Overall this was a good book but one that didn't work for me personally. There are a lot of great aspects to this book, like the military setting and the world, but as a whole I didn't love this as much as I'd hoped. I would still recommend checking this out as I think this will be loved by many and I've already seen a ton of five star reviews of this book.

You know those books where you finish them and you're absolutely speechless, like gobsmacked speechless (in a good way)? This is one of those. So, apologies if parts of this review are an incoherent mess. That's just what this book has made me.

The Poppy War tells the story of Rin, an orphan living in the Rooster Province, who shocks everyone when she comes first in her district in the Keju, a test to find the best and brightest to send to the Academies of the Empire. Rin ends up at Sinegard, an elite military school, where she discovers she possesses a talent for shamanism.

First off, this book is intense. And it only gets more so as you read along. Part one follows Rin from taking the test to the start of the war between the Federation and Nikara. One thing I really liked about this was that, while she was at school, and initially there were some detailed descriptions of lessons to set the scene, it wasn't like a lot of first books in series where not a lot happens until right at the end. The first part was gripping and moved quickly too. Based on the first part alone, I'd have probably rated this 4 stars. But then part two happened. Part two ups the ante considerably. Suddenly, they're at war, and it's brutal, and you think this book cannot possibly get more intense than this. But it does. It got so intense I needed to take a break just to calm down. It got so intense I am absolutely terrified at the thought of how the second book is going to go. Especially given that ending.

If the best thing about this book was the plot, then the characters and relationships came in close second. There's an excellent enemies to friends (to lovers? I can live in hope) relationship as well as a wonderful found family, some of whose scenes had me laughing out loud. I really don't know how to describe how I felt about all the characters, because I loved each and every one of them (or at least, each and every one of the ones I was supposed to, and the ones who grew on me). The characters in this book, particularly Rin, Kitay, Chaghan and Nezha, are probably some of my favourites I've read this year.

The one teeny tiny problem I had with this book (and it's a problem that's personal more than anything) was that occasionally the writing seemed a little clunky, particularly in the lulls between action scenes, and some things felt a little underdeveloped, like Nezha's character development (but that's probably because it mostly happened off page). But like I said, it's more personal feelings than anything major, and likely it's just because this is a debut. Anyway, the intensity of the plot more than made up for it.

I requested a copy of this book off NetGalley because the cover was beautiful and the premise intriguing. The Poppy War is a story based on Chinese culture and draws inspiration from the Sino-Japanese war, and also deals with opium and drug use/abuse. This is the story of an orphan girl, the last survivors of a murdered race, of war and its horrors.

In short, The Poppy War is very well written. I can see it becoming very popular and doing quite well after release. It’s also dark, bloody, and not my type of book.

The Poppy War is broken up into 3 distinct parts. Part 1, my favourite part, mostly takes places in the military academy of Sinegard, the top school in the country. Rin, the main character, was unfairly challenged by social and racial prejudices. There’s some fantastic character development here, and I really loved this part of the book. It felt like a coming-of-age, magical school type of book. Then I hit part 2.

Parts 2 and 3 were much darker than the first part, and I did not enjoy them nearly as much. Not because they were poorly done or the story boring, but because it became much too dark for my tastes. This is where Kuang takes the characters from their secluded military academy and throws them headfirst into a war against people with no qualms about genocide.

The characters and the world at this point still interested me, and Kuang did a fantastic job of developing the characters as they went through the horrors of war. However, the descriptions here are incredibly graphic, and my enjoyment of the book began to wane.

The Poppy War has fantastic potential. It’s well written, has interesting characters, a unique world, and a well thought out plot. It also includes self-harm, drug use/abuse, genocide, sexual abuse/assault, racism, human experimentation, violence, murder, and is very graphically dark.

this book had my emotions going haywire in so many ways, but do you know what, i actually think this is my favourite books of 2018.
this is a fantasy book loosely based on 11th centuary china and japan. there are some pretty dark moments in this book that give the reader a real sense of just how brutal those wars were. there is masses of substance abuse too, which can be hard reading for some people.
rin is a character that from the start you fall in love with and you want her to do well. some people have said the story is too long, but i feel the length was perfect, there was no rushed parts, a picture was painted in your minds eye about everything, all the characters involved were in plenty of detail. all in all i feel this book was a brilliant story, captivating and humbling at the same time and i thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Poppy War by R F Kuang is the author's debut novel and, I have just learned, the first in a trilogy. It's a fantasy book set in an Asian-inspired part of its world (compared with the multitude of fantasy books set in European-inspired parts of their worlds), and follows a teenage girl as she goes from being a poor rural shop girl to playing a prominent role in the titular war.

When Rin aced the Keju—the Empire-wide test to find the most talented youth to learn at the Academies—it was a shock to everyone: to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who believed they’d finally be able to marry her off and further their criminal enterprise; and to Rin herself, who realized she was finally free of the servitude and despair that had made up her daily existence. That she got into Sinegard—the most elite military school in Nikan—was even more surprising.

But surprises aren’t always good.

Because being a dark-skinned peasant girl from the south is not an easy thing at Sinegard. Targeted from the outset by rival classmates for her color, poverty, and gender, Rin discovers she possesses a lethal, unearthly power—an aptitude for the nearly-mythical art of shamanism. Exploring the depths of her gift with the help of a seemingly insane teacher and psychoactive substances, Rin learns that gods long thought dead are very much alive—and that mastering control over those powers could mean more than just surviving school.

For while the Nikara Empire is at peace, the Federation of Mugen still lurks across a narrow sea. The militarily advanced Federation occupied Nikan for decades after the First Poppy War, and only barely lost the continent in the Second. And while most of the people are complacent to go about their lives, a few are aware that a Third Poppy War is just a spark away . . .

Rin’s shamanic powers may be the only way to save her people. But as she finds out more about the god that has chosen her, the vengeful Phoenix, she fears that winning the war may cost her humanity . . . and that it may already be too late.

This book is many things, and long enough to fit them all in. It starts out with Rin, our main character, working hard to escape a crappy life of being married off to some old guy by her foster parents. Once her hard work pays off, the book takes on the feel of a boarding school story while she trains at the prestigious military academy and butts heads with other students — and, of course, stands out for being the poor girl from a southern province. The school part of the book was probably my favourite. It sets up a lot of relationships for Rin, builds up the world and some of its history, and introduces the shamanic aspects that become so central to Rin’s story. This section and what preceded it made me love this book.

Rin’s time at school culminates in the outbreak of war. For all that it happens around the halfway mark, I don’t think talking a bit about it is a spoiler, given the book’s title. The war heralds another change of fortune for Rin and the story shifts from boarding school yarn to a) being about a ragtag band of misfits and b) a brutal war. (And who doesn’t live ragtag bands of misfits?) The brutality of the war sort of snuck up on me, although perhaps it shouldn’t have since the signs were there. I don’t want to get spoiler-specific, but I do want to give a massive trigger/content warning for pretty much all the wartime atrocities you can think of, many of which are described in horrifying detail. I was not fully prepared, and it took me some time to process enough to keep reading and to write this review when I was done.

The thing is, because this book ends in war — especially war that isn’t fully resolved because there’s a sequel to come — it’s easy to focus on that aspect and overlook the earlier and more general aspects of the book. For example the world building was excellent. It’s clear that the main setting is based on China and the nation they are at war with is based on Japan. However, there isn’t an obvious/specific real-world analogue for everything, the geography is quite different to that of China (looking at the map, there is, for example a west coast) and of course magic plays a significant role in the story. It felt a lot less artificially “and here is what not-Japan did next” than other books I have read (The Tiger’s Daughter immediately springs to mind). Instead, for a lot of the book, it felt like the Asian version of non-specific European fantasy books, which I really appreciated. That said, I do have to note that some events towards the end of the book clearly were inspired by real-world events, which kind of undermines my point, but whatever.

The important things to take away from this review are that this is a really good book and that it contains a brutal account of war. It grapples with class divides (until these suddenly matter much less), drug use (which is also entwined with the magic system), and vengeance. Rin's conversations and internal monologue are interspersed with dry/dark humour, which I enjoyed and which made me snort out loud several times. I highly recommend this book to all fans of fantasy, especially those that enjoy the elements I mentioned above (poor girl does great things, military boarding school, asian setting, horrifying war, etc). Although it's the first in a trilogy (according to the author — it's really not made clear elsewhere), it does wrap up a lot of the story at the end. There are a few loose ends and a strong sense of "well, here's what we need to do next" but it doesn't feel unfinished. No need to fear cliff hangers or put off reading until the rest of the series is out. Personally, I'm glad of the gap so I can finish processing before moving on to the next in the series, which I will definitely be reading.

5 / 5 stars

First published: May 2018, Harper Voyager
Series: Apparently the first book of a trilogy, no series name as yet
Format read: eARC
Source: HarperVoyager UK on NetGalley

Everything about this book was fantastic. The descriptions were amazing, the characters were believable and I was on the edge of my seat for the whole thing. (My full review is in the podcast link!)

Content warning: Rape, Violence, Drugs

According to the author, this book ‘draws heavily on the Second Sino-Japanese war which- if you know anything about Asia – was one of the darkest and bloodiest moments in Chinese history’. I do not know anything about Asian history, my own history lessons being woefully euro-centric, so I cannot comment on historical accuracy, but this is a rich setting, clearly laid out in the book. It’s the kind of book where the world builds as the story progresses, rather than having a lot of explanation and exposition at the beginning of the book. I liked this development as this is such a detailed setting that to have been presented it all in one go would have been far too overwhelming.

The story opens with the most difficult and stressful exam I have ever heard of (and I made it through finals at Oxford – I’m kidding…kind of). I thought this was a good way of grounding the reader in something familiar, most people, I would imagine, can relate to being stressed about a test or evaluation in life. Since so much of the rest of Rin’s experience isn’t exactly typical for most readers (particularly not the part that involves wielding magic), this was a clever way to ease the reader into this story.

This read to me as a story of two halves. There is the first half, where Rin is at the prodigious school Sinegard. This isn’t a Harry Potter style magic school novel, nor is the education portion of this story skimmed over. Personally, I felt like this half of the story was the strongest, but I have a feeling that is just my personal preference for this kind of story as opposed to the politics and violence of the second half.

What is the second half? Largely a war/battle narrative alongside Rin’s continued character development. While this is less to my personal taste than a fantasy academy, this was the part of the book where one encounters the best side characters – which I will come to in a moment. There is a huge amount of violence in this book. One violent episode is described by one of the characters and I had to read it in segments because I started to feel hugely uncomfortable. If you are triggered by reading very violent and gory text I would suggest either not reading this or having a friend bookmark those pages for you to avoid.

 What I will say is that the violence and battle scenes in this book never feel like they are brutal for the sake of being brutal. Compare this book, for example, to Godblind by Anna Stephens in which the descriptions were so graphic I felt seriously ill at moments – and it didn’t serve the plot. You could argue that this book doesn’t need the graphic descriptions in the same way, however, for one thing, R. F. Kuang is referencing a historical event (the Rape of Nanjing) and also it is part of Rin’s motivation and it helps to enhance the readers understanding of the nature of these two enemies.

Speaking of Rin, it would be foolish of me not to discuss her characterisation in this book. Initially, I thought Rin would be a typical young female, rags to riches protagonist. She grows up in a household that takes advantage of her, pulls herself through this difficult test, goes to the fancy academy and discovers she has powers that not everyone has. On paper that is a very cliché YA novel (I’d still read it if I’m honest). However, as I read this book I realised that Rin had been given so much more characterisation than that. This isn’t a rags to riches story. This is a story about hard work and about finding acceptance through that work. The fact that Rin is a ‘peasant’ at a school for the wealthiest in the land isn’t downplayed, but it is quickly superseded by more important plot points.

I was also worried that there was going to be something of an insta-love storyline that emerged. However, once I got to around 60% through the book it became obvious that this wasn’t the story being told. This is the first book I’ve read in a while that romance didn’t feature romance, it may be that will be a plot point in the later books in this series, but for those looking for a book devoid of lingering glances, I think you will be pleased.

I said I would mention side characters, that time is now. The cast of characters in this novel is rich and varied. From the hilariously contemptuous teach Jiang to the soldiers with whom Rin fights and becomes friends. These characters are fleshed out and so interesting, I would gladly read a spin-off novel for each of them!

If you’re looking for a dark, gritty fantasy novel which involves characters who swear, get periods and all the other real-world things that bring a fantasy novel into the realms of reality then I would look no further than The Poppy War. It’s a great example of this genre and I look forward to reading the later books in the series.

My rating: 4/5 stars

I received a digital advanced review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

We’re not going to lie, the first thing we did when opened up our digital copy of The Poppy War was complain that it was a PDF and that it had so many bloody pages. The second thing we did was get absolutely hooked and sit on the edge of a chair for two hours until our stomach started rumbling and we realised we were halfway through the book.

A lot happened in The Poppy War, like A LOT. Questionable decisions, country invasions, people dying of enemy inflicted lacerations. This book doesn’t thread lightly, it hits you in the face like tonne of bricks and makes you love it all the while. It’s a novel filled with pain and magic and what bookworm doesn’t love those two things in inordinately high amounts?

Our main character’s name is Rin and she’s a smart character who’s not so smart at times. The starting point of R. F. Kuang’s debut has her in a little village where she gets little love and where if she doesn’t find a way out, she’ll be married off to a man twice her age because her guardians want that and she’s just a peasant girl so really, why is she complaining when it’s obvious that she’s not going to be offered anything better in life…

But Rin has goals. She’s going to pass the Keju and she’s going to get in to Sinegard. What the rest of the book does is examine the consequences of choices made by a young girl. It does so on a personal level with the people Rin finds in Sinegard and a much larger empiric scale.

It’s fascinating.

The Poppy War has so many characters and a lot of them exist firmly in the grey area when it comes to morals and some when it simply comes down to are they friend or are the foe and it’s easy to muse over the motives of characters in this book. Kuang has you questioning everything because she builds a world that rests on fragile foundations. You know it’s going to go boom and you’re wondering who will lie where when the dust clears. Will they be on the side of good? The side of evil? Or will they show that there is no good and evil, there just is.

Speaking of world building, we looove the details of this one. The politics, the cultures, the myriad of gods, the history and how it plays with a fantasy school with a difference.

The Poppy War has some of the tropes of every other fantasy school. There’s a multitude of isms (see classism and sexism) to prop up the I’m so much better than you trope and therefore you are my enemy, let me get you expelled or killed thanks so very much aspect. There are classes, eccentric teachers and houses of a sort, but what this book does differently is have a lot more than a year pass and have the school feature in around 55% of the book. We liked it because it broke a stereotype before it could really take hold.

To finish up this review, we’d like to say you that this book is one of the most anticipated novels of the year for a reason and if you don’t read it, there’s a vengeful Phoenix god who’s going to burn you up when you don’t.


***


So, were thinking the other day, how do we get to rave liking demonic fangirls about books we love without spoiling the entire thing for would be readers AND THE ANSWER WAS SIMPLE.

WE'LL JUST DO TWO REVIEWS.

So, hello and welcome to the spoiler review of The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang where smart girls give zero fucks and obstacles better get out of their way before they get moved.

Aren't you excited!?

You are. We can tell.

The Poppy War is a book about a girl called Rin who, in order to get out of a future marriage development practiced dubious studying methods and got into the most prestigious school in the Empire. Yo, Sinegard, what's up?

Rin's answer cookie. It's evident from the beginning of the novel, but she's also, sometimes, a dim cookie and she made the kind of decisions on occasion that had us ready to throw her off a cliff. A major example of one of her bad decisions being somewhere around halfway through the book where she called down a god after being warned not to and then suffered the consequences.

Consequences being dead people and dead people and even more dead people...

*sigh*

God, we love fantasy.

The Poppy War is basically two books fit into one and it benefits so much from the sheer amount of world building and action that happened because of it. It would have been a major mistake to split it in two. There's just no moment where you feel something end sufficiently to cut the story up.

It's obvious that the author and editors and everyone else were doing their jobs.

What wasn't obvious, however was ALL THE BLOODY DECEPTIONS.

Su Daji isn't a good woman. She's a bad one. Jiang isn't just an adorable eccentric teacher who gives us heart eyes. He's a man who comes from legend and wooh! He should put that on his dating profile. Legendary lover. Hollah

In the vein of the deceptions there are characters who our opinion has done a one eighty on.

Nezha, who started out a classist little bitch is the boy who we ship Rin hard with. Now, he may or may not be dead and Rin may or may not be a newly minted genocidal teenager by the end of the book, but the chemistry between them is lit. We could practically feel sparks flying off our phone screen.

Our opinion of Altan also changed drastically. He started off so cool. We were like, yes, this is the guy who Rin should be friends with, but then he became an asshole and we really didn't like him. We thought, go play in traffic Altan. Get hit by a truck Altan. Altan? Altan!? Why are you still alive?

Rhetorical question.

He's not.

*cue evil laughter*

On a side note, Altan and his lieutenant totally had a thing going on behind the scenes and we'd like it to be confirmed in canon, thanks €€

Despite all the wonderfully dark thing that happen in The Poppy War, there are dark things that aren’t remotely wonderful and honestly, they made our insides twist, but they worked for the story. War isn’t grand and epic, it’s gritty and awful and Kuang does a good job of reminding us of that.

In conclusion, this has been the easiest review we've ever written and we'll be doing more spoiler reviews like this in the future. Focusing back on this book, however, you need to read it because it's great and because we're going to throw it at your head until you give in and dive in and die with happiness as you reach the end. Okay? Okay.

THE POPPY WAR is A:TLA/Korra crossed with the Second Sino-Japanese War, and an epic at its most compulsively readable, and I need the next books so badly.

Wherever Rin is, whatever her story is at the time, I'm immersed. It's a coming-of-age, until it's no longer that. It's a school story, until suddenly it's not. Then it's a war story. A revenge story. A story of gods and all humanity. The yet-unwritten story of Rin. It weaves and morphs and it achieves it all with such seeming ease. The pacing is amazing - three parts, over a time period of 2-3 years. It's a long story with long chapters, but I was never bored; just constantly as hungry as Rin to know more, more, more - about the truth, about the history, about the mythology, about the future to come. The world-building is just so interesting that even as I read through paragraphs of histories and explanations, they fly by.

(There's some obvious real-life analogues that help that along; if there were blanks, I filled them in myself. If you're familiar with the Second Sino-Japanese War, that's exactly how dark and violent TPW gets. I do wonder how different readers will process certain events, as there were things I saw coming because I knew what happened in our own history, so I didn't experience the same kind of first-time horror.)

I fell in love the entire cast of characters, which is the worst thing I could have done, because it's unflinchingly about war, all that leads up to it, and all that comes of it. Characters die. Characters do monstrous things. They do things to survive, to save people, to avenge. Horrific choices are not forgiven in war, but they're a product of war, and TPW never lets you forget that. Many stories focus primarily on a character's individual background affecting their choices, but TPW generously layers in the background of their people, of the wars before them, of the fighting, exploitation, propaganda and sacrifices that shaped the world the characters were born in. I feel both the character's responsibility for their actions, and the millennia of history that's brought them to this point and time, a history that makes the events seem inevitable. I love how the story contrasts perfect moral choices in philosophical bubbles versus real choices in an imperfect world, where all options may be bloody - if not now, then later on.

And we get such an array of characters. Each of them carves a different path, is molded differently by war, and have different moral compasses. I don't cheer for Rin or the others in the traditional sense, not when their "successes" often come with a hefty price tag; I just want them to find peace and some semblance of happiness together. There's an amazing amount of camaraderie. It's a lot of fun while Rin's at school, and it's a beacon of hope in wartime. There are funny, ridiculous moments. Characters whose presence can make me grin. It's hard to feel hopeful in this kind of story, but there are so many satisfying moments where characters act together or come to understand each other, that I really do feel hopeful at times. And there's no romantic storyline, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to ship, cough.

And lastly, THE GODS AND DRUGS. This is actually the part that sold me initially, because I saw the author's blogpost about her query for this story - drop acid, summon gods! Even more intriguing in the actual story. They add a whole new layer to everything else. I can see it already - the gods will be a matter of debate throughout the whole series. They're the enigma. We get conflicting and vague accounts of them, tricksters and liars and betrayers, and stories masquerading as truth. It just all worked so well together thematically with everything else (there's addiction to the drugs, but also to power and vengeance, yay!). The gods are the part of the story that's very A:TLA, in a good way, because I always wanted more of that lore explored.

(One more lastly: the cultural details! I haven't experienced Chinese fantasy like this before! Part of that is on me, I just don't seek them out because they seem foreign even to me sometimes. But TPW felt especially familiar to me, partly because Rin is the kind of heroine I love reading about, and partly because she's from the Rooster Province a.k.a. fantasy Guangdong, a fantasy version of the place my own family came from. They were countryside peasants! My parents had to test into college! I understood the Shanghainese accent thing! And there's also the unfortunate real colorism, nationalism, conformism, and bureaucratic nonsense, too.)

TPW is the epic fantasy I never knew I was waiting for. I'm in love, addicted, and distraught. And it's by a debut author! I can't wait for all the books from her, in this series and any more to come.

I have no doubt this will end up being the best fantasy debut of the year 2018.

No no, scratch that understatement. Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you a review for The Poppy War, a book that will go down as one of the best grimdark/military fantasy debuts of all time.

Once in a while, there comes a book that you just know will be a fantastic book just from the premise or the cover; this was one of those books for me. I’ve been eyeing this book ever since I stumbled upon the gorgeous attention-grabbing cover by Jung Shan. (Seriously, check out her artworks. They’re incredible.) Reading that the book is highly inspired by Second Sino-Japanese War also the Rape of Nanking—please look this up if you don't know about it so you’ll have an idea of how dark the book will get—sparked my interest even more. However, although I had a good feeling about this debut, I certainly didn’t expect it to be THIS incredible. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that this is literally THE best grimdark/military fantasy debut I've ever read; even better than The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie or Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher, and this author only turns 21 years old this year! How awesomely talented is she!?

Before I begin my long review, I will clarify that I’m an Asian and my review for this book will be affected by my experience growing up as one. Then, I need you to consider these two questions:

1. Do you enjoy or are you okay with reading books with a lot of violence? Because this book contains plenty of vividly brutal scenes. The author doesn’t pull any punches and the violence was handled splendidly, not only for the purpose of showing the horror and tragedy of war but also to let these scenes become a huge part of characters’ developments.

2. If the answer to question one is an absolute yes, I’ll ask you this: "are you ready for this book to go into your favorites of all time shelf?" because there’s an incredibly high chance that it WILL happen.

The Poppy War is a debut by R.F. Kuang and it's a coming-of-age grimdark military fantasy. It's a book about empires, drugs, shamanism, and gods, and it's highly inspired by Second Sino-Japanese War, which is one of the darkest and bloodiest periods in Chinese history. I grew up learning about this war and it gave me great satisfaction to read an epic fantasy book inspired by it; one that was written exceptionally well, too. Considering the root of inspiration for the book, it's obvious that there will be a lot of allusions to China and Japan (I’ll get into them more later) and that this will be a violent book. This is not a YA book; there are a lot of scenes that are definitely only appropriate for adults to read and there are tons of content warnings (I’ll list them at the end of my review) in part III. This is also not a happy-go-lucky story to read. Also, this is literally the first time I’ve read a fantasy book written by a female author that doesn’t feature ANY romance in it. (Thank God!)

“If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?”

As a Chinese myself, I have my own reasons for believing that The Poppy War is an Asian inspired coming-of-age grimdark military fantasy done absolutely right with finesse. Part I (roughly 40%) of the book may lead you to think this will be strictly an epic/high fantasy with a complete focus on learning, but this isn’t really true. Yes, the story does start with our main character, Fang Runin (Rin), learning tons of skills and forming friendships in a military academy called Sinegard. However, the storyline immediately took a different approach and became a complete grimdark/military fantasy in Part II and III. This won’t be a situation like Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicle where after two installments he’s still in the University (I love this series so much though). Story structure wise, this book actually reminds me a lot of Blood Song (another of my favorite debuts of all time), where the first half revolves around the character in a battle school and the second half revolves more around war and battles. This book alone feels like a trilogy in itself due to the sheer amount of monumental events that take place. Kuang did what a lot of authors try to do in the scope of a trilogy within the span of ONE book. Kuang’s prose was easy to read, simple, and most importantly, VERY engaging. Her writing never gets in the way of her story and it was truly compelling to read.

I need to give another reminder that part III in particular was filled with brutal scenes. These scenes are written exceptionally well; the author clearly shows the horrors of war and please do remember, like I said before, these scenes aren’t just there for the sake of making the book darker. The scenes are all there for the purpose of the story, characters development, and world building. In fact, this book just wouldn’t hold the same powerful impact without these scenes. The pacing was also brilliant. There wasn’t any chapter that bored me, none whatsoever. This is truly a story with a fine balance of heart, emotion, brutality, and action scenes that were only possible because of how magnificently written the author wrote all the characters, action sequences, and world-building.

“Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.”

Rin has seriously become one of the best female heroines I’ve ever had the chance to encounter. She’s a highly well-developed character, multi-faceted and simply kickass. Her rise from a mere peasant, oppressed and hated by everyone because of the color of her dark skin and her low status, to becoming what she has to be as the story progressed. This was one of the most well-written developments of a heroine or any character I’ve ever read. She makes brutally tough choices, she rises to any challenge that comes her way, and she never gives up. She’s fierce, she’s badass, and she demonstrates that being a strong woman character doesn’t only mean being physically powerful but mentally powerful, as well. Even though we see the story unfolds solely from Rin’s perspective in third person narration, the author does a fantastic job in making sure we’re really inside Rin’s head at all times. At one point, I actually forgot that I was reading the book in third person point of view as Rin’s character and personality were so well explored that I felt like her story was being told in first person POV. Besides that, all the other supporting characters' personalities were so well fleshed out because Part I was used VERY effectively to establish the characters’ introductions and world-building, making rooms for developments in the second half despite the story being in the middle of all the chaos. There’s always something new to discover on every page, and no words are wasted.

No military fantasy will ever reach greatness without intricate war tactics or extraordinary action scenes, and this book simply scored wonderfully on both counts. Every action sequence, whether it’s the martial arts battle or the magic system, was vividly written. The scale and scope of the action relentlessly escalate with each page turned. The magic users in this book are called Shaman—those who commune with the Gods to use their power—and Kuang did a terrific job researching Shamanism. Coincidentally, during my time reading this book, I received an email from one of my favorite artists, Noah Bradley, on his new art piece for Magic: the Gathering and somehow, it completely fits some of the action scenes in this book.

Lastly, I want to talk about the world-building. The history in the world of this book is filled with constant warfare, and this is also where the Asian influences really prevailed. There are TONS of Chinese and Asian influences in this book; I’m going to mention only a few of them here so you can experience the rest on your own:

-The provinces in this book are named after the twelve Chinese Zodiacs.
-The four cardinal mythological Gods are named exactly after the same Four Symbols of Chinese constellations creatures: the White Tiger of the West (Byakko), the Black Tortoise of the North (Genbu), the Azure Dragon of the East (Seiryu), and the Vermilion Bird of the South (Suzaku).
-The creator of the military tactics book named Principles of War in the story is called Sunzi, obviously named after the famous Sun Tzu and his Art of War.
-I’m a Buddhist (I think this is the first time I mention my religion in a review) and I’m pretty sure that Kuang used the name Bodhidharma intentionally to harken to Buddhism. In Buddhism, Bodhi means enlightenment and dharma means cosmic law. Considering the nature of Shamanism in this book, this naming and its meaning is very appropriate.
-Ki derives from Qi/Chi which means life force.
-Federation of Mugen, the name of the group of antagonists in this book, in Japanese means Infinite/Fantasy/Dream and they resembled the Japanese code of war where they are simply tools for the Emperor to use.
-Just one look at the map and you’ll also know that the world is based on China and Japan.
-Then there’s also talk of the legend of Monkey King from Journey to the West.

Believe me, I’m holding myself back here; I’m pretty sure I found almost all the Asian influences in this book and I could talk about them in detail but I want you to experience them for yourself too. I spent four hours writing this review and it has been long enough already. In fact, this is actually my second longest review of all time. I really wish I could talk about how amazing this book is but I have to make sure my review is spoiler-free enough for readers to experience this debut with maximum results. You simply have to read and experience this greatness for yourself.

The Poppy War is an astounding debut and one of the greatest starts to a series I’ve ever read. It’s a shining treasure of fantasy, literature, history, and culture. R.F. Kuang is truly a new author to watch. If this doesn’t become a one-hit wonder and she continues writing as her career, I have absolutely no doubt that her name will be up there with the likes of Robin Hobb and N.K. Jemisin, and maybe even better. I’m already waiting for the second book eagerly. I don’t even know how Kuang will top this debut; it’s a magnificently written debut that will stay in the heart of readers. By this point in my reviewing career, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to my followers that I’m quite stingy with giving a full five-star rating, but this book simply deserves a full five stars. The Poppy War is a book truly worth every second of your time. It’s a profound blending of history into military fantasy. It’s a relentlessly tension-packed book. Rin will capture your heart, embrace it. The Poppy will make you high, accept it. The War will break you, face it. The Poppy War will most likely be included in your favorite books of all-time list, get it. Come May, buy and read this superlative page turner immediately. This is the beginning for a new queen of fantasy and you should consider yourself damn lucky to have the chance to witness it.

The quotes in this review were taken from an ARC and are subject to change upon publication.

I received a copy of this book in exchange of an honest review via NetGalley.

The poppy war was a brilliantly complex and thought provoking debut novel, one that was nothing like I expected based on the synopsis. It blew my mind and took me 2 days to gather my thoughts for a review. I still don’t know if I succeeded in delivering my opinion about it accurately.

The book has a strong writing style and there is nothing simple about it. Just by looking at the some of the words used in it you know that there went a lot of planning and thoughts into it. It is beautiful and so easy to read, to get into it despite the heavier topic.
As for the world building, I enjoyed it immensely. It is intricate, vivid and put together but not too complicating. The story is basically set in a historical Asian country, period but some of the technology and elements has a distinctly modern feel to it. However, the most amazing thing about the book is the incredibly evolution and the depth of the storyline. Honestly, the book is long but it was the first time that I actually felt like I was reading a different book by the end of it. There is so many things happening in it and the direction of the plot changes completely, that by the end the atmosphere is different. I loved how the story progressed, how it started out as a pretty harsh but still mild tale and slowly but unexpectedly it unfurled into a shocking, brutal, dark and bloody adventure. OMG, it was just phenomenal.
The storyline consist of different elements, the war and action, the main character’s development but apart from this there is the deeper, more meaningful part to it as well. The majority of the book discusses a lot of somewhat current and timeless, theological, moral, philosophical and such questions, different sides and possible answers to them. Personally I’m not a big spiritual person so some of these discussions were a bit mumbo-jumbo for me but most of it I enjoyed. It just gave an extra edge, a different perspective to a book generally focusing on fighting and war.
The story doesn’t have an overly fast pace, I would call it more like a intense simmering burn still there is not one boring or dull moment to it. It has a great balanced dynamic to it.

The main character Rin, is the proverbial conflicting protagonist. Sometimes I loved her, sometimes she annoyed me but I had a strong connection to her all the way along. She falls more into the grey area, than black or white. My first impression about her was that she is ballsy and cunning, persistent and hard worker. However, along the way she has a tendency to get a bit too greedy, impatient and power hungry. This side of hers wasn’t my favorite because while she was really smart for some reason her anger and need for recognition prevented her to make the right decisions. And she needed to make some hard choices but her character represented the whole “What’s wrong and right is only a matter of perspective” theory. I liked her but it was hard to love her some times. It was a bit strange but at the same time really refreshing to read about a main character who didn’t fall into the heroic, always making the noble choices and saves everybody kind of stereotype.
There are a lot of interesting and well developed side characters in the book, but I think most of their purpose is to stage the motivating questions or competition for Rin. I saw a lot of possibilities in some of them and I absolutely loved the misfit band of the Cike and their complete devotion to each other.

While with some minor changes the book could have been a standalone as well, I’m happy and elated that it’s actually a trilogy and can’t wait to proceed to the next book. The poppy war ended on a devastating but promising point. I think I’m going to finish it here because I don’t want to accidentally spoil anything. I loved this book but it’s definitely not for the weak and light hearted, it’s full of graphic details of aggression, torture, rape, substance abuse and self harm but if you don’t get queasy about these things then I definitely recommend to give it a try.
My biggest disappointment was that the e-copy I got had some problems with the maps and such in the beginning, meaning it was messed up, patchy or altogether missing and I think I lost out on some additional excitement because of this.