I will preface this by saying that I am not familiar with Chinese history or language or mytholgy or culture or anything….so I can’t judge its accuracy or anything like that.

With that in mind…I enjoyed this.

The writing itself was nice and the length of the chapters made this a really easy read.

The characters…look. I enjoyed being with Wei (our MC) as she learned…all the stuff she learned (trying for no spoilers here). However, the book is called The Poet Empress, yet it was actually about the relationship between two brothers. So…idk. If it was called something else and was just told through Wei’s POV, maybe I’d feel differently. But as it is, Wei is our main character and she was highly underdeveloped; she was just a vehicle for telling the story of two men. I will say though, that I did like their story, convoluted as it was. Esp as it was told to Wei by multiple people and we get to see how no one really knows what actually happened. No one had the whole truth, and everyone’s truth was colored by their own biases, and I feel like that point was done really well here.

The plot…there were some issues for me. There were definitely instances where things happened a bit too conveniently to be believable. I also feel like the flow was a little disjointed? Maybe that was just me, but I felt like sometimes we moved on from something too quickly and it never got brought up again.

I did find the violence really gross. It wasn’t super graphic or anything, but I didn’t find it necessary. It was used as a way to show the villainy of one of the characters, but I feel like there were other ways that same thing could have been achieved. And also, the way it was basically dismissed part way through as a given and barely given any actual onscreen (on page?) time just felt like…idk. Dismissive? And the main victim of said violence didn’t get any time to process or unpack what was going on, but accepted that it was a part of their life? It just felt like a lazy way of villainizing one of the characters and inciting a strong hatred in another.

The ending was interesting. I can honestly say that there were a few things that I did not see coming, so in that way it was satisfying. I always enjoy when an author surprises me though 🤷🏻‍♀️

Overall, I enjoyed this and I’m glad I read it. I haven’t read anything with a magic system like this, so that was pretty cool. I wish we got to learn more about it though. The world building as a whole was kind of lacking imo, but I like a lot of world building, so maybe that’s just me.