The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 7/10
This book was a gift from my friend Amanda, who loves fantasy and science fiction novels. If you know me, those aren’t my choice genres, although I do read them occasionally. Most of the time I read a fantasy novel and it doesn’t hit the same as Deathly Hallows the day after release – I’m a third of the way in and I can still put it down, go do whatever else, and then come back to it a day or two later without thinking constantly about it. There are only a couple (fantasy) books I remember literally not being able to do anything else until I finished, and some of these memories might have been altered by time and nostalgia, but: Eragon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Lightning Thief, to name a few.
The Poppy War was somewhere in between. I read the first 100 pages, then took a week long break, then the remaining 400 pages in a string of continuous waking hours. Don’t get me wrong, it was insanely entertaining, and I have a lot of respect for R.F. Kuang (who is basically my age) for writing a book that, in many ways, was a slightly more adult version of the Percy Jackson series.
I was in awe at how Kuang was able to make these characters so complex (I’ve been hyperaware of how authors develop characters ever since attempting NaNoWriMo). Of course, I rooted for Rin for basically 98% of the book, but at the end, the reader really has to come to a reckoning: which character is right? Is there even a “right” and a “wrong” in this situation? It’s not so clear — and there’s this acute sense that what Rin sees and narrates might not be the truth, more so than in other third person omniscient novels. Even so, in a world with perfect information, decisions made during something as complex and vast as a war could not be divided into camps of “right” and “wrong”. It’s a sort of epistemological study at the end of the novel, studying the actions, reactions, and motivations of the Nikara and the Federation.
The pace was also great. Like I said, the beginning was a little slow to me, but that’s because I only like fantasy books when there’s a lot of fighting (the Department of Mysteries scene in HP5…), and there’s no fighting until later in this book. But after she gets to the academy and develops her little feud with Nezha and her friendship with Kitay, there’s more action that keeps the book chugging along at a nice pace.
Finally, I admired the nods to historical events Kuang inserted throughout the book. Obviously the title references the Opium Wars, and there are scenes, as Kuang writes herself, based off of the Rape of Nanjing and other battles fought in China. I am hopelessly ignorant about Asian history in general, so I suspect that if I knew more, I think I would have had a field day reading this book.
I’ve sung nothing but praises so far, so what brought this book down from a 10 to a 7? A couple things: there were some literary idiosyncrasies that I didn’t like, and there were a lot of characters I thought left undeveloped unnecessarily. For the literary idiosyncrasies, there were so many times where something was described using opposite synonyms at the same time, like “It was horrible. It was wonderful.”, or “she hated it. She loved it”. I didn’t really notice it until it happened twice in quick succession near the end of the book, and I thought it was a little lazy (?) because there definitely are more ways to describe a character having an internal conflict or holding two opposing opinions about the same thing/idea. As for the undeveloped characters, I really wish we had learned more about Jiang, the Empress, Venka, and Suji. They all made some important decisions in the book and it wasn’t always clear to me what their motivations were. Maybe they will be revealed in the next book!
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