Man, I really wanted to love this book.

I really like the author and their content, so I had high hopes for this. But honestly, I’m kinda disappointed.

I will say I do think this book was written in earnest. It is not necessarily a feminist novel but rather a female rage novel. Which made a lot more sense to me after I had finished it.

I’ll first go over some stuff I did like:

I liked Li Shimin’s character, and felt he was probably the one with the most depth.

I also really enjoyed the setting. A fantasy sci fi set in the future inspired by various Chinese histories? Sign me up, that sounds banger.

The start of the book, aka the first 100 pages, were actually really promising. I quite enjoyed them.

Then everything started to go downhill from there ..

Stuff I didn’t like:

Pretty much everything else.

I think the pacing of the plot was fine, but it was the events of the plot that were mostly meandering and kind of pointless until the last 50 pages or so.

Gosh, who is Zetian even supposed to be? I had a really hard time reading in her POV the whole book because I just had no idea who she was. I have no clue of her morals, her inner conflicts, her beliefs, they’re all either briefly mentioned or kinda muddy.

The worldbuilding was really weak for me, which was such a let down because I was going into this expecting awesome world building. But there were a ton of plot holes and places where the worldbuilding just didn’t add up. We know so little about the main enemies of the story. They’re briefly mentioned a few times for battles and then never brought up again, then brought back as a last plot point for the ending 75 pages.

This book failed to answer really simple questions for me in my opinion. How exactly do Chrysalisses work and who is building them? How is spirit pressure measured? What exactly enforced the belief that women were naturally weaker that caused the entire system to rely on that?

There are a lot of plot points that get brought up once and then never again until the last chunk of the story. Same with some of the characters.

There’s also no map, which i think I really needed because I didn’t get a good sense of the world. Half the time I kept going ‘wait…where even are they?’

Finally, themes of the story were kind of lacklustre. Though I guess that’s a given considering this is an unfinished series.

For a book about female rage and taking down the patriarchy, there really aren’t any other female characters of significance besides the main character. Which I don’t know, felt kind of important? I mean, what happened to all those girls at the start of the book who were taking tests to become pilots?

I think this is just a me thing, I really think the book could’ve benefited from another female character that was pretty major in the story. Not inherently as an ally of the FMC, but just as another major character.

The writing style was also weird and clunky. There was a lot of repetition and sentences that just didn’t need to be there.

Also just don’t generally like when books are labelled LGBTQ when that is a very minor part of the story. Comes off as bait in a lot of cases.

I don’t know. Could’ve been a lot worse, honestly. I just had high hopes.