Iron Widow
Apr. 17th, 2022 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraIron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao. I had strongly mixed feelings about this book, and rather than try to decide which of them are spoilery I'm going to park the whole thing under a cut. I will say that I think you might like it if you really liked The Hunger Games.
So, okay, the good - the premise of Pacific Rim-style "you need two people" giant mechas + Ugh, Patriarchy was pretty solid, and there were a lot of really great visuals with all the different forms and everyone's armor and qi lighting up in different colors and a canonical ice skating interlude and, generally, Anime Done As Prose. I really liked that the protagonist is disabled (pain/difficulty walking due to bound feet) and gets a wheelchair partway through and is immediately more mobile and more comfortable and there was never any ableist anti-mobility-device negativity. I also really liked that instead of yet another tedious two-guys-one-girl YA love triangle Zhou went full poly and got the guys together too, like, yes, thank you, someone actually did it! And I thought the balance of hints that there was more going on here but leaving it until the epilogue to drop the big backstory twist was well-done; we got to see how things would play out under the initial premise and now we know what to be curious about for the next book.
Unfortunately a lot of the writing and certain character choices didn't really work for me. I found the emotional pitch of the book pretty exhausting - super-heightened and super-volatile, even for YA, everything up to 11 all the time and the protag constantly in a fury or in hysterics (or occasionally horny). We need some quiet moments! Give your plot and characters a little space to breathe! Also, while it was easy to follow how the *plot* was unfolding, in terms of a leading to b leading to c etc, the emotional arcs felt harder to grasp. Were we still on suicidal vengeance, or had we moved on to survival at all costs, or was the protag actually now invested in the war effort, or... ? What did she actually want most, what did she actually fear most? I think you can write a good book where the protagonist isn't actually sure, or guesses wrong, but I think that works best when the audience has some insight that the protagonist doesn't. I didn't.
And then there's the murdering. I am not so much into the Batman-style "protagonists can never kill even if it means letting a mass-murderer live to do many more murders" ethic (okay before someone comes to argue with me about Batman, sure I will buy that it is interesting as a part of his whole Bat-pathology. Maybe I mean Disney-style, "villains need to conveniently fall from a height while the heroes keep their hands clean". My favorite take on this ever is of course still ATLA and Aang's *genuine deep moral commitment* vs. literally everything else pointing the other way.) But I was really put off by how eagerly the protagonist killed people, some with full premeditation (and even torture), and how little it seemed to weigh on her. I mean, okay, sure, write an anti-hero, but if she doesn't care about other people, maybe I don't care about her either? The bit at the end where she's just killed her entire family but is more upset about the possibility of her nudes being leaked... and so one of the boyfriends (the one who hasn't already killed his family) kills *his* father... this is all very operatic but I think it might work better in a medium like film or comics where we could be watching the drama from a more external POV, and thus wouldn't have to be quite as alienated by being in her unsympathetic POV.
So, yeah. Some very cool stuff but some big negatives. I... might read the next one? Out of curiosity where Zhao plans to take the story, if nothing else? The protag is named for the only empress to ever rule China in her own name... maybe some shades of R.F. Kuang basing her protagonist on Mao in the Poppy War books, or what Parker-Chan is doing in She Who Became The Sun, like, there is then the question of which parts of their historical figures' lives these protagonists are doomed to recapitulate or not. (Is the waterboarding with the wine the infamous wine-jar execution, or is that still coming??) (I'm not sure if I happen to be paying particular attention to Chinese alternate-history lately, or if in fact there's a recent surge in Chinese alternate-history in particular?) Also I suppose I might end up reading the next one for awards reasons, this book finishes two different Hugo categories for me this year and thus seems like something whose sequels might also come up in that context. (Resisting the temptation to rank out my ballot tonight... already up too late... a separate post...)
So, okay, the good - the premise of Pacific Rim-style "you need two people" giant mechas + Ugh, Patriarchy was pretty solid, and there were a lot of really great visuals with all the different forms and everyone's armor and qi lighting up in different colors and a canonical ice skating interlude and, generally, Anime Done As Prose. I really liked that the protagonist is disabled (pain/difficulty walking due to bound feet) and gets a wheelchair partway through and is immediately more mobile and more comfortable and there was never any ableist anti-mobility-device negativity. I also really liked that instead of yet another tedious two-guys-one-girl YA love triangle Zhou went full poly and got the guys together too, like, yes, thank you, someone actually did it! And I thought the balance of hints that there was more going on here but leaving it until the epilogue to drop the big backstory twist was well-done; we got to see how things would play out under the initial premise and now we know what to be curious about for the next book.
Unfortunately a lot of the writing and certain character choices didn't really work for me. I found the emotional pitch of the book pretty exhausting - super-heightened and super-volatile, even for YA, everything up to 11 all the time and the protag constantly in a fury or in hysterics (or occasionally horny). We need some quiet moments! Give your plot and characters a little space to breathe! Also, while it was easy to follow how the *plot* was unfolding, in terms of a leading to b leading to c etc, the emotional arcs felt harder to grasp. Were we still on suicidal vengeance, or had we moved on to survival at all costs, or was the protag actually now invested in the war effort, or... ? What did she actually want most, what did she actually fear most? I think you can write a good book where the protagonist isn't actually sure, or guesses wrong, but I think that works best when the audience has some insight that the protagonist doesn't. I didn't.
And then there's the murdering. I am not so much into the Batman-style "protagonists can never kill even if it means letting a mass-murderer live to do many more murders" ethic (okay before someone comes to argue with me about Batman, sure I will buy that it is interesting as a part of his whole Bat-pathology. Maybe I mean Disney-style, "villains need to conveniently fall from a height while the heroes keep their hands clean". My favorite take on this ever is of course still ATLA and Aang's *genuine deep moral commitment* vs. literally everything else pointing the other way.) But I was really put off by how eagerly the protagonist killed people, some with full premeditation (and even torture), and how little it seemed to weigh on her. I mean, okay, sure, write an anti-hero, but if she doesn't care about other people, maybe I don't care about her either? The bit at the end where she's just killed her entire family but is more upset about the possibility of her nudes being leaked... and so one of the boyfriends (the one who hasn't already killed his family) kills *his* father... this is all very operatic but I think it might work better in a medium like film or comics where we could be watching the drama from a more external POV, and thus wouldn't have to be quite as alienated by being in her unsympathetic POV.
So, yeah. Some very cool stuff but some big negatives. I... might read the next one? Out of curiosity where Zhao plans to take the story, if nothing else? The protag is named for the only empress to ever rule China in her own name... maybe some shades of R.F. Kuang basing her protagonist on Mao in the Poppy War books, or what Parker-Chan is doing in She Who Became The Sun, like, there is then the question of which parts of their historical figures' lives these protagonists are doomed to recapitulate or not. (Is the waterboarding with the wine the infamous wine-jar execution, or is that still coming??) (I'm not sure if I happen to be paying particular attention to Chinese alternate-history lately, or if in fact there's a recent surge in Chinese alternate-history in particular?) Also I suppose I might end up reading the next one for awards reasons, this book finishes two different Hugo categories for me this year and thus seems like something whose sequels might also come up in that context. (Resisting the temptation to rank out my ballot tonight... already up too late... a separate post...)
