As beautifully written and full of political intrigue, violence and backstabbing as the first. It’s a fair bit more brutal than the first book, which wasn’t a walk in the park to begin with, but I feel like it was all very much in the service of the story it was telling. It’s a lot of suffering, including gendered violence, homophobia, graphic sexual violence, self-harm, BDSM needleplay somewhat disguised as acupuncture, and cycles of abuse victims explicitly becoming abusers. While I have not seen The Radiant Emperor duology described as gothic, with its labyrinthine politics and usage as ghosts both as symbols and real and important to the reality of the book, I could see it bearing that label.

Cards on the table, I just kind of don’t feel like unpacking my feelings about this one in public in front of cis readers (even if I know not all of you are) in further depth than I'm offering here right now. I respect Shelley Parker-Chan’s literary ambitions and their commitment to making such routinely unpalatable, miserable characters open for interpretation to a wider audience, but trying to put my feelings into words is leaving me feeling a bit exposed.

The humanity Parker-Chan lends characters who would simply be mincing, evil f-slurs in another writer’s hand is beautiful, just as Zhu and her wife might be one-note girlbosses. Obviously I read into the ambiguities with my own queer (but objectively correct, duh) lens. To me, a lot of how this book treated gender – basically as a torture device – felt very trans to me in a way that’s hard to discuss with cis people without them dismissing it as “that’s just the patriarchy in general.” Yeah it is, but this feels like a very specifically trans experience of the patriarchy from a majority of the cast.

This book really did a fantastic job of recreating a specific kind of grief many of us carry for our friends who never saw survival as an option, and pulled down the curtains during their downward spiral. Nothing’s quite hit me in those tender spots in the same way, and I hadn’t realized I still had some bruises there. This wasn’t an easy read, and I was definitely yearning for the ending of the book at least a hundred pages before it arrived. However, I felt quite held and understood by the end.