English language
Published July 16, 2023 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.
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.
I deeply enjoyed the conclusion to this duology. At times it was bleak and dark, but I feel like my thoughts on the first book continued to ring true in this book more than I had expected.
It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but the thing I liked the most about this book is when it brings two characters together that are ostensibly similar to each other to highlight their differences. Zhu and Ouyang (both not men in their own way) go on adventures. Chen and Zhu (both pragmatically pursuing greatness) face off against each other. Ouyang and Wang (both focused on revenge) have a showdown. I just love seeing all these characters be such foils for each other.
The finale especially was satisfying emotional closure that brought all these main characters together. Even through sacrifice and suffering, there was more hope than I thought there might be. …
I deeply enjoyed the conclusion to this duology. At times it was bleak and dark, but I feel like my thoughts on the first book continued to ring true in this book more than I had expected.
It's hard to talk about this without spoilers, but the thing I liked the most about this book is when it brings two characters together that are ostensibly similar to each other to highlight their differences. Zhu and Ouyang (both not men in their own way) go on adventures. Chen and Zhu (both pragmatically pursuing greatness) face off against each other. Ouyang and Wang (both focused on revenge) have a showdown. I just love seeing all these characters be such foils for each other.
The finale especially was satisfying emotional closure that brought all these main characters together. Even through sacrifice and suffering, there was more hope than I thought there might be.
(I wrote some longer thoughts with spoilers in this reply).
I really wanted to like this sequel to an excellent novel, but for me it wasn’t enjoyable and took an effort to finish. Although well written and richly visualized, the story spends a lot of time dwelling on a certain miserable uninteresting character. And everyone else are terrible people (all the content warnings). I ended up skimming some chapters. I will check out the author’s future books
