Read as a buddy read with @ayzrules. Back when I found out about this book, she made a joke about how they should have hired me to do sensitivity reading for it because I’m a poet. Just between us PBers, I probably would have skipped this one if not for my commitment to the bit. At least commiserating with a friend while reading will be a positive memory to hold onto.

To clarify, aside from calling myself a poet – which I almost fear to do at times since I could hardly dare to place myself among well-known luminaries who do the same, like Taylor Swift – I have a Masters’ of Fine Arts in Poetics and Creative Writing. Poetics is specifically the study of the making of poetry versus studying poetry as an observer. In other words, I’ve dedicated a not insignificant amount of my life thinking about why people make poetry. I wish The Poet Empress had spent some time on that, too.

Poetry has a kind of strange place of tension in the North American cultural mindset: it’s both something any over-dramatic teenage girl can do when she’s sad, and something that is elitist, inaccessible, ancient and unfailingly dull. Somehow it occupies both the spectrum of being unserious, unpolished and silly AND too serious, too strict, and too high-minded.

That being said, poetry as an ancient form of expression and record-keeping have been used in many fantasy epics as a part of world-building. There is quite a lot of precedence to find similarities between spells and poetry. The main thread of The Poet Empress - writing a poem powerful enough to kill a tyrant – is the kind of thing poets have probably been jerking themselves off to before bed every night since dawn of language.

Unfortunately I feel that the gap between ideas and execution is just too large. This book failed to move me. For all of its ambitions, what I felt most about this book was puzzled and bored.

Writing is a deliberate act of creation. Every choice made in a fantasy world is a choice that is made for the untold thousands living in the world created. World-building shouldn’t exist just to create obstacles for characters to get through, a world is a house every character lives in. So it’s frustrating when a book leans on misogyny, classism, physical and sexual abuse, but there’s huge gaps where the walls, pillars, hell, even the foundation should be. It winds up feeling arbitrary. How different would the world actually be in a world where emperors, and apparently only men, were born with magic? How would a society where all women, even nobility, were not allowed to read, even function? How did they get to that point? Maybe I missed that, but I don’t feel the society within The Poet Empress sufficiently answers how different life would be under such circumstances. What would the excuses for this obvious injustice be, and why would the main character seem to be the first one who ever made any headway rebelling against it? The Poet Empress lacks a lot of fundamental world building, leaning on the relationships between the characters and the inherent drama of the situation. Unfortunately, it also lacks the spark of passion that would make these conflicts compelling.

Emotional things happen, and Wei, the main character, experiences them, but it never quite seems to do the work of actually getting the reader there. As a poet, when I teach other poets, my biggest demand is: take me there. I don’t need you to tell me that sexism is bad and missing your family is sad, or it would hurt to get stabbed. That could happen to basically anyone on the planet. What is unique to your (or your character’s) experience, how does it feel in your body, how are all these fundamentals of human existence different when lived by you (or your character)? When a book simply states what is happening, when it fails to embody what is happening, it is expecting the reader to pick up the slack and simply insert their own feelings. This is particularly frustrating if what you think you would do in Wei’s position is vastly more angry and defiant than she appears to be.

This book takes on a somewhat strange format where Wei is essentially embarking on a research project to find what the fuck is wrong with Terren, because for Magic Poetry Reasons, if she loves him, she’ll be granted the ability to kill him. She finds out about this after he’s been a cartoonishly evil piece of shit to her for a hundred pages already. About 70-90% of this book is her finding out about things that happened to Terren before she got there. Call it the Rashomon approach, but instead of each witness directly telling their story, we actually never change perspective and just sit there with the judge explaining to us what she (Wei) just learned. This is especially egregious when so much of the story consists of other people telling her stories about Terren or her reading directly from his brother’s journal and then just recounting what she read. What exactly is the purpose of first-person if the result is simply Wei summarizing what she learns?

Yet, for all we remain firmly seated with her, I never feel as though Wei feels strongly enough about anything to do more than passively endure, and this, to me, is a failure to capture her through the prose or give her a clear voice. Details that should have already been established, or straight-up add to her backstory but weren’t discussed at all, will suddenly come up as the moment needs it. Wei’s internal landscape feels so lacking that even some of the biggest twists in the story feel like they were not hinted toward. To paraphrase BookTuber Reads with Rachel (regarding a different book), “We’re right there in first person with you. It’s not a twist, you lied to us.”

Wei is also that specific type of heroine where it genuinely seems like the misogyny exists to keep her down specifically, and every other woman around her is either a victim or a bitch. The narrative feels more than a bit conservative with its views on how women might obtain power through sexuality, framing this as scheming and negative. The only queer act committed in this entire book is done by a woman trying to gain advantage, which is frankly pretty sickening.

Actually, now that I think about it, it might just be that this book takes a dim view on everyone generally, as victims of abuse are all more or less treated the same way, either they’re complete victims or they’re monsters because of it. There’s basically not a single bit of examination on the existence of court eunuchs while the courtesan system is framed as inherently unfair.

I understand that Terren is meant to be a character who is evil but complicated, but he lacked any hooks to make him compelling, which means that all of this digging into his past doesn’t amount to much. He is so lacking in vulnerability or charm that it is impossible to care about him even a little. The crumbs we get about him are too little, too late, and don’t feel super insightful into the things he’s experienced. He kills some animals but not all of them. He wishes he could be someone or something else so he could avoid suffering. These are all passive observations by Wei, she rarely connects with him aside from his frequent physical violence – and even that stops being shocking early on because how little it leans into the pain and horror of it.

I honestly don’t have much to say about the large action-set-piece ending except that it all wrapped up pretty quickly and in a way I didn’t find very convincing. But I didn’t find the book to be convincing in general.

This one fell flat for me, folks. Surprisingly little poetry. I found it un-empressing.

The Poppy War by RF Kuang is an action-fantasy on an epic scale, that attempts to take on complicated stories such as political corruption and genocide, and the cosmic, terrifying, uncaring forces of the gods, all against the all-too-real backdrop of the Sino-Japanese war and borrowing imagery from the rape of Nanking and the incomprehensibly cruel Unit 731 experiments. In this plot I will have to discuss some general plot elements but I will do my best to avoid explicit spoilers, although I do discuss one moment portrayed in the early chapters of the book.

First off, I want to acknowledge that Kuang was young when she got this book deal. I’ve TA’d Writing 101, run writing workshops, and generally have some experience working with writers at that stage of their life, although this was at a community college, so, a little bit of a different class position and education level than Kuang’s.

Many young people just entering college have a passion for storytelling but they’re just figuring some of the world out on their own, whether it’s understanding that every man in your life treated you like crap, that you actually do just kind of have to move on after your dear dog or grandma’s passing, that white privilege and racism are real no matter how much you didn’t consent to be a part of it, etc. No one is born “knowing better” and a lot of work from young college students tends to be extremely emotionally led as they are constantly encountering new information, forming identity, and trying to figure what kind of person all this new knowledge will shape them into.

There is, of course, the privilege of the well-off and well-educated to get to behave as experts on everything, that they can “write whatever they want,” a certain arrogance that is taught. It is a privilege to be allowed to be bold and lack introspection or self-criticism or wider social awareness, to talk about high-minded social justice issues while at the same time only discussing them in broad, blunt terms, to exist in spaces where controversial choices are encouraged and defended, that simply writing about traumatic things is “telling the truth,” no matter where, why and how these truths are deployed. There are some who might mistake indulging in that privilege as inherently progressive when done by someone who is non-white or not a cis man.

Kuang stands at an interesting intersection. I did some surface level research just to see if I saw anyone else making the same criticisms I had, mostly because I wanted to know if Kuang had ever addressed them. I have no doubt that Kuang has received extra scrutiny because of her gender and race. I want to make absolutely clear that, if anything, those aspects of her identity make me want to go easier about my problems with the book. I understand she had family on her father’s side who survived the Japanese occupation of China. I have similar family connections.

I take the view that in-depth critique is a form of respect. I am not tearing down Kuang to tear her down as a person. I don’t know her. I see in The Poppy War a lot of problems that I think are worth discussing. It would be worse, in my opinion, to just write her debut book off as juvenile and self-indulgent, both words I’ve thought to apply to this book at times.

There’s this part early in The Poppy War where a street urchin child gets run over by a cart. This seems to be meant to hint at the innate corruption of the world: if the street urchin lived but was injured, the cart owner would be on the hook to pay for the kid’s treatment and support him if he were crippled. To simply kill the child incurs a one-time fee, so it’s actually smarter to kill the child.

The child exists in the story to be killed. The act exists to be observed. It seems to serve little other narrative purpose aside from being something for the main character to react to and learn a lesson from. I feel this very strongly about many of the more reprehensible enemy acts that are described in this story. I have already read extensively about the atrocities committed by the Japanese in this time period and onto World War II – I may be part of a smaller population of readership that, while naturally disheartened and disgusted, did not find any of these descriptions to be new knowledge. There is an instance of sexual brutality that only serves to be avenged, the survivor isn’t mentioned again in the narrative. In fact, all of the atrocities in this book seem to exist to justify acts of revenge.

I am not squeamish about books with violence, sexual or otherwise. I’m generally an ardent defender of problematic content and everyone’s right to portray it. However, I do think it’s worth bearing in mind that stories are purpose-built and don't necessarily have to be as senselessly cruel as the real world. In a story, every single thing is understood to have significance to the world the story is building. I do not like what the world that Kuang built seems to be saying, whether intentionally or not.

First off, my least serious concern is just that, in a world where people can channel the gods to be insane killing machines, having enemies commit such real, grounded acts of brutality brings to mind questions of scale. Would warfare have developed so closely along the same lines as our world in this situation? Is that gruesome truth of human nature inevitable? If Nikara is China and Mugen is Japan, if things had proceeded without the cast’s intervention, does that mean eventually that Hesperia (the West) would have eventually decided to commit its own war crimes against Mugen by some fantasy equivalent of a nuclear bomb? Are the forces of Hesperia actually quite divided and engaged in its own mass killings? And what of the gods of other places, not just China or Japan or the West, but everywhere else with a pantheon? In making this story so one-to-one with its use of real world atrocities, it invites comparison to those real world events. In doing so, one questions how the world might have turned out differently if not for the complex web of human events and imperialism throughout history.

My biggest, most serious concern is just in the portrayal of several lone survivors of an indigenous group (the Speerlies) as dark-skinned, angry, victimized people prone to addiction. At one point, an important ancestor of theirs was faced with the impossible choice of either facing destruction or annihilating the rest of the world, and that ancestor decided against it, dooming their people. Now the survivors carry that legacy and must face similar choices. The Poppy War in general seems to take a dim view on spirituality as solely a conduit to power – the gods all seem almost comically, unfairly transactional. The price is always more than anyone sane would be willing to pay, and desperation is frequently preyed upon. This has the unfortunate effect of portraying this group of people as somewhat backwards due to who they worship, because their only choices are either to make a deal with a god that that doesn’t care about their values, or to be wiped off the face of the world, with its few survivors being enslaved for the same power that couldn’t save them on their own terms. In terms, the relationship between the two survivals is extremely toxic and abusive, which then also plays into racialized gender stereotypes.

Gesturing back to the points I made earlier about young writers, I think I can see some of the ideas Kuang was trying to get to. It’s about the unfairness, the desperation one finds in clinging to someone who is your only connection to a lost heritage, the desire to act against an abusive world. However, the Speerlies are fundamentally victims with almost no room for nuance. Per the narrative, they didn’t really have a chance between all bigger forces around them. In making Speerlies dark-skinned, Asian colorism also rears its ugly head. Even if the point Kuang was attempting was, “it’s bad to mistreat dark-skinned people and abusing them results in very dangerous unhappy people,” I feel this portrayal dips into problematic ideas about similar groups being less civilized and more inherently prone to violence, which ironically serves to justify the very colonial viewpoints that Kuang seems to seek to criticize. Does being isolated turn people into monsters like that? It certainly can, and millions of books discuss this very thing with various degrees of success. However, the framing of this doesn’t feel precise enough. Altan in particular frequently comes off as extremely unreasonable and violent in comparison to his non-Speerly peers.

I’ve heard folks say that Rin is an unreliable narrator, but to me, the machinations of the plot are so lacking in nuance that it’s hard to believe Kuang imagined any other options for the Speerlies aside from the ones they took, because their options seemed to nobly and passively face getting steamrolled or to commit a genocide as revenge. I fear this is always my problem with sympathy toward minorities in certain fictional settings. Survival is not as sexy as revenge, especially to privileged people. The existence of marginalized people is flattened to anger and suffering. The Poppy War is particularly guilty of not positing any existence that includes self-love, cherished cultural memory, or indeed anything aside from trauma.

I am not against anger, revolution or uprising, but failing to give these characters any nuance at all, and deliberately cutting them off from any sort of community or care strips them of vital humanity. We are supposed to understand that people pushed into a corner will invariably turn to unspeakable violence. They have no opportunity to define their own identity or love for themselves of their own culture aside from world-threatening anger.

I’m not angry that Kuang wrote this book even if I think it’s problematic. I think it was born from understandable anger, and there was a desire for reclaiming white Western power fantasies that did not wind up subverting them so much as recreating them. I think many young writers go through a period of this, but generally outside the public eye. My issue is somehow it got to the point where it's a pretty significant entry into current fantasy canon. I can’t argue with the book’s success but I can question it, and question it I do. I’m frustrated with the environment this book was born into, where its bare-boned portrayal of a fantasy ancient China peppered with gods and mythic figures is treated as an exotic novelty, and discussions of its violence will center more around how uncomfy and sad it made readers.

I also just think in general the quality of the writing was extremely average. Its language completely failed to excite or surprise me on a craft level. For the first 40% of the book, I thought that would be the only criticism I would have, so, on top of everything else, The Poppy War has pacing issues.

If you’d like to read another really stellar insight into how this book handles genocide and making even more pointed criticisms about its point of view in light of the genocide in Palestine, I highly recommend this review: https://sadiareza.substack.com/p/the-poppy-war-palestine-and-the-liberalist