She Who Became The Sun
Nov. 3rd, 2021 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraShe Who Became The Sun, Shelley Parker-Chan. I started this book in a state of almost total cluelessness (a state I find very natural!) - my reading-list note said "alt-hist China fantasy", by which my past self could have meant anything from a second-world fantasy like Empress of Salt and Fortune that's a lot *like* China in some ways, to ultra-specific change-one-thing-and-here's-what-else-changes stories. I'm going to put my eventual journey out of cluelessness behind a spoiler cut, so before that let me just say that I thought it was good and interesting and I recommend it, in general, and will specifically throw out some tags, in the least spoilery way possible, for "gender", "strategy", "ambition", and "loyalty". And I'm almost certainly Hugo-reccing it.
Spoilers behind this cut, but I'm still being cagey about the specifics. So, okay, I probably know slightly more about Chinese history than the average USian, which is to say I took one really good survey class in college about 25 years ago and can now reliably come up with the names and very rough timeframes of about six dynasties, which doesn't seem like very much but I would guess most USians have not even taken one such class. This is obviously vastly less knowledge than anyone who actually knows anything, but it's something. So for awhile, reading this book, I felt pretty confident that it was set in real history, but sort of assumed that the main characters were made-up people running around in that real history, and that some of the secondary characters were probably real or based on real people. As things went on, I got more and more curious about who exactly was real and where exactly on that dimly-remembered dynastic timeline we were, and whether we were diverging or not. Somewhere around 70%, I got curious enough to hit wikipedia, which was like - oh! that's the guy! and that other guy, he's that guy! and - and - ok! wow! I see! A less clueless person might have already known all that all along, but for me this was a pretty great way to read the book - the bulk of it having absolutely no idea where it was going, character-arc-wise, and then the last bit knowing who was supposed to survive, and getting to see whether it turned out that way or not.
And now behind *this* cut, more specific major spoilers. If you're already behind the first cut, please enjoy this long and pointless sentence that is really just here to give you a chance to stop reading before you get to the spoilers, which maybe you want, but maybe you don't, I don't know, I guess if you're the kind of reader for whom keywords jump out from big blocks of text, you've already seen a couple of them, I don't know, sorry about that, spoiler space is awkward here but I suppose I could throw in a couple of line breaks and hope for the best?
break
break
really this time
Okay, so I really loved getting to know Zhu from peasant to monk to soldier to commander to ******** without any idea of where that story was going. It was also brutal, sometimes - early on it seemed like Zhu might be turning into a Gen or Miles victory-through-cleverness figure, which, like, okay, *sort of*, but there is a definite darkness and real-brutality-of-history here that I don't think those fictional people have, whose stories have been contrived to keep them from having to do quite so much killing. (Although... please imagine me screaming about certain other Gen parallels?!? In some post-reading web searching I've seen some marketing describing this book as "Mulan meets Song of Achilles", which, like... I *guess*... but that really misses the factional-intrigue part, and Ouyang's entire plot... my marketing would be more like "Queen's Thief meets the Daevabad trilogy, but realer than either", but maybe even that is too spoilery?)
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Ouyang is entirely fictional, which is interesting because it leaves him wide-open to have whatever kind of arc Parker-Chan can fit into the constraints of the facts. (I think this book works pretty well as a standalone, but is apparently the first of a duology, which leaves me surprisingly wild to find out what will happen next given that I just read all the facts on wikipedia. But how will Parker-Chan play them, and how will everyone *feel* about them...) Ouyang as Zhu's mirror/inverse/entangled pair is so good, the way they are two such different and yet related takes on gender and loyalty and fate. I am always happy to get to read about people who stand "outside" standard gender in some way, and the way that Zhu's plot complicates and subverts the gender-disguise trope was really satisfying, and Ouyang's was a really interesting angle I can hardly think of having read from a POV character before. I'm so curious to see how the queerness of this history factors into Parker-Chan's take on how it all ends.
And, hey, one more cut for a couple of content notes, including major spoilers. I guess if you want the content notes but not the above spoilers, just... don't look up?? Anyways, this opens with a famine, which I always find hard to read about. And, for the book as a whole, notes for child harm and child death. Pretty telegraphed imo, and for me did not hit me in the "I can't handle reading about this" place, but ymmv.
Spoilers behind this cut, but I'm still being cagey about the specifics. So, okay, I probably know slightly more about Chinese history than the average USian, which is to say I took one really good survey class in college about 25 years ago and can now reliably come up with the names and very rough timeframes of about six dynasties, which doesn't seem like very much but I would guess most USians have not even taken one such class. This is obviously vastly less knowledge than anyone who actually knows anything, but it's something. So for awhile, reading this book, I felt pretty confident that it was set in real history, but sort of assumed that the main characters were made-up people running around in that real history, and that some of the secondary characters were probably real or based on real people. As things went on, I got more and more curious about who exactly was real and where exactly on that dimly-remembered dynastic timeline we were, and whether we were diverging or not. Somewhere around 70%, I got curious enough to hit wikipedia, which was like - oh! that's the guy! and that other guy, he's that guy! and - and - ok! wow! I see! A less clueless person might have already known all that all along, but for me this was a pretty great way to read the book - the bulk of it having absolutely no idea where it was going, character-arc-wise, and then the last bit knowing who was supposed to survive, and getting to see whether it turned out that way or not.
And now behind *this* cut, more specific major spoilers. If you're already behind the first cut, please enjoy this long and pointless sentence that is really just here to give you a chance to stop reading before you get to the spoilers, which maybe you want, but maybe you don't, I don't know, I guess if you're the kind of reader for whom keywords jump out from big blocks of text, you've already seen a couple of them, I don't know, sorry about that, spoiler space is awkward here but I suppose I could throw in a couple of line breaks and hope for the best?
break
break
really this time
Okay, so I really loved getting to know Zhu from peasant to monk to soldier to commander to ******** without any idea of where that story was going. It was also brutal, sometimes - early on it seemed like Zhu might be turning into a Gen or Miles victory-through-cleverness figure, which, like, okay, *sort of*, but there is a definite darkness and real-brutality-of-history here that I don't think those fictional people have, whose stories have been contrived to keep them from having to do quite so much killing. (Although... please imagine me screaming about certain other Gen parallels?!? In some post-reading web searching I've seen some marketing describing this book as "Mulan meets Song of Achilles", which, like... I *guess*... but that really misses the factional-intrigue part, and Ouyang's entire plot... my marketing would be more like "Queen's Thief meets the Daevabad trilogy, but realer than either", but maybe even that is too spoilery?)
Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Ouyang is entirely fictional, which is interesting because it leaves him wide-open to have whatever kind of arc Parker-Chan can fit into the constraints of the facts. (I think this book works pretty well as a standalone, but is apparently the first of a duology, which leaves me surprisingly wild to find out what will happen next given that I just read all the facts on wikipedia. But how will Parker-Chan play them, and how will everyone *feel* about them...) Ouyang as Zhu's mirror/inverse/entangled pair is so good, the way they are two such different and yet related takes on gender and loyalty and fate. I am always happy to get to read about people who stand "outside" standard gender in some way, and the way that Zhu's plot complicates and subverts the gender-disguise trope was really satisfying, and Ouyang's was a really interesting angle I can hardly think of having read from a POV character before. I'm so curious to see how the queerness of this history factors into Parker-Chan's take on how it all ends.
And, hey, one more cut for a couple of content notes, including major spoilers. I guess if you want the content notes but not the above spoilers, just... don't look up?? Anyways, this opens with a famine, which I always find hard to read about. And, for the book as a whole, notes for child harm and child death. Pretty telegraphed imo, and for me did not hit me in the "I can't handle reading about this" place, but ymmv.
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Date: 2022-01-24 06:40 pm (UTC)