Hardcover, 400 pages
Published Aug. 22, 2023 by Tor Books.
Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high on her recent victory that tore southern China from its Mongol rulers. Young, ambitious, and in possession of the Mandate of Heaven, Zhu believes utterly in her own capacity to do anything – endure anything – that will allow her to seize the imperial throne from the Mongols and crown herself Emperor.
But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor, the former courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband – and her powerful kingdom has the strength and resources to wipe Zhu off the map. The only way for Zhu to defeat Madam Zhang is to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the beautiful, traitorous eunuch general Ouyang.
Nearly mad with the grief and guilt of having killed his beloved Prince of Henan, Ouyang is alive for only one reason: to enact revenge …
Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high on her recent victory that tore southern China from its Mongol rulers. Young, ambitious, and in possession of the Mandate of Heaven, Zhu believes utterly in her own capacity to do anything – endure anything – that will allow her to seize the imperial throne from the Mongols and crown herself Emperor.
But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor, the former courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband – and her powerful kingdom has the strength and resources to wipe Zhu off the map. The only way for Zhu to defeat Madam Zhang is to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the beautiful, traitorous eunuch general Ouyang.
Nearly mad with the grief and guilt of having killed his beloved Prince of Henan, Ouyang is alive for only one reason: to enact revenge on his father’s killer, the Great Khan. His instability soon threatens his partnership with Zhu, who has never felt grief in her life. Zhu can’t even imagine what kind of sacrifice could ever cause her to feel it. But all desire costs, and while Zhu has already paid with her body – the true price of her ambition will break even her ruthless heart.
It’s certainly a worthy sequel to this blend of real history and transmasc Mulan and the fraught relationship between Zhu and Ouyang takes centre stage for me. Zhu as always brings intelligence and brash confidence to every confrontation while in the background the court politics of the Great Khan begin to overtake events.
Content warning Spoilers for all over both books
When I finished She Who Became The Sun, I was disappointed to have to wait for this sequel, I had loved that volume so much. But this one really didn't draw me in in the same way.
I'll start with parts I did enjoy. Parker-Chan is a great writer, both as a conjurer of scenes, and in the way they draw characters richly by switching between interior perspectives and the perceptions of others. The arc of Zhu and Ouyang haltingly moving towards understanding each other is compelling until it's cut short, and the "Zhu's capers" scenes are just as much fun as in the first volume.
But I found the shifting motivations of the characters took a lot of interest out of this oen. Wang and Ouyang felt flattened by their hyperfixation on revenge at all costs. Madame Zhang's fixation with the self-imprisoning role of Empress when she had so much real power as Queen makes no sense. Zhu's shift from desperate, audacious attempts to survive to grasping at "greatness" apparently for its own sake had the odd effect of making the stakes seem smaller even as the story gets bigger, which makes the violence feel gratuitous in turn, in a way that it never did in the first volume no matter how grim things got. And Ma and Xu both seemed shrunk by their portrayal as basically martyrs for the revolution.
I spent much of the book wondering why Zhu and Zhang couldn't just come to some detente and enjoy their successes, and why anyone other than Xu Da and maybe Ma Yinzi followed Zhu with such loyalty. Towards the end Ma has some lines which seem to explain it in a sort of social justice way, but coming so late in the book they felt tacked on.
I'm still looking forward to the next thing Parker-Chan writes, but found this one kind of a let-down.
