I can see the shape of what this was supposed to be, and to be fair, it is a difficult net to weave. Tao is not up to the task. Clunky prose, the world’s shallowest treatment of class/gender dynamics, and abominable pacing drag us through this mess. Tao doesn’t trust her readers to pick up anything. Every piece of plot is explained in tedious detail, every chain of thought painfully linked as though Tao is working to a word count. The world Tao builds here is beautiful in theory, but no amount of generic descriptions of pavilions, pagodas, and plant-animal hybrids makes this believable. Poetry, supposedly, is at the heart of the book and magic system, but this is never explored in detail, and nothing is poetic. Tao almost resents the ‘literomancy’ she’s built, resorting to it only when plot convenient. She does everything she can to wring emotion from the reader—detailing tearful children toddling around, reams of animal torture, sword-based interior design, a long, long list of heinous actions—and it reads like a grocery list. There’s no narrative weight to anything, all rendered in lackadaisical, stripped prose. Our main character, a more hollow skeleton of plot device I’ve yet to meet, reacts to insidious, gruesome, inventive torture the way a child does cough syrup. There are no psychological repercussions, no internal or external damage. She is the Ultimate Victim, perfect in her passivity, infinite in her compassion, and single-handedly inventing modern feminism (as so many of these YA heroines seem to do?). This, Tao insists, is because Wei was born poor. Maybe there’s a point to be made here, but its done so clumsily that the incisive class commentary just seems, bizzarely, to boil down to ‘poor people are great at being tortured’ / ‘poor is when kind and rich is when moral decay’. After a good chunk of torture-porn-as-shock-value, the narrative structure gets even clumsier. Tao decides that the heart of this novel shouldn’t be Wei learning to survive concubine politics, grappling with complexities within herself, or clawing up the chain of power, but a series of clunky, info-dumping flashbacks from not one, not two, but three character perspectives, as Wei unravels why her husband is evil. She thinks that this unraveling will help her with a killing spell that only works if you…love the victim? This COULD be interesting and dark as fuck, but Wei turns it into a research project. For some reason, the narrative acts like knowing a person’s backstory is equal to loving them? This makes no sense (like a lot of the plot, tbh) but Tao is very insistent on making absolutely positive that there is No Romance here! Because romance in this kind of relationship is icky and no one in their right minds would love their abusers—(though isn’t that the kind of moral complexity we should be grappling with here? You promised messy. Depth isn’t just when child abuse or Loving Your Little Brother.) The bulk of the book is the trite realization that ‘hurt people hurt people’….and we’re supposed to be wowed and impressed by this. Though Wei is a hurt person, this realization makes her decide to end the cycle. But then she doesn’t. Another graduate of don’t-be-mad-at-me-island, Tao is desperate to reiterate that murdering people is Bad Actually and, through the novel’s ending, refutes the themes of compassion and restoration that the book spends so much of its overstay building; never forget that the only justice is punitive and we can’t have difficult feelings because someone on twitter will write a call-out post. Looking back, there are actually quite a few other characters in this book, but they’re mostly interchangeable stock characters; the conniving concubine, the scheming eunuch, the heart-of-gold peasant. “Since you will soon be dead, I may as well tell you everything” is an actual sentence said scheming eunuch actually says. This is what I mean—there’s no subtlety, no elegance, no poetry, in the Poet Empress.