This a 10/10 book.

Trigger Warnings for this book: This book is not suitable for people of all age, and contains elements of Rape, Murder, Torture, self-harm, drug (ab)use, drug peddling, child abuse, unhealthy study habits, genital mutilations, implicit genocide, war crimes on both sides, fictionalised aspects of the Second Sino-Japanese war and elements of high fantasy concerning the nature of divinity. Do not read if descriptions above could be considered triggering or challenging or psychologically damaging.

And now, onto the review of this book.

As a Chinese-Australian, with my father’s side of the family originating from Nanjing, mainstream fantasy stories with elements of Chinese culture always excites, intrigues, and horrifies me for mostly similar reasons: Excited because the community receives some representation; intrigued because generally the premise sounded nice on paper; horrified because nine times out of ten, it is written in a way that those aspects becomes completely unrelatable, cultural traditions gets butchered, the premise becomes poorly executed due to poor writing or a misinterpretation of things. I am happy to say that I am excited, intrigued, happy, and horrified for entirely different reasons that will quickly become apparent as you read on.

I originally found this book not through word of mouth, but through randomly following the Writer’s Twitter feed after a viral tweet by her made me care enough to visit the author’s website and read a bit about the rough premise of this book.

The rough concept of this book revolves around Dominance, Pain, and really really awful decisions being made by the ‘good side’ and the bad side. In execution, it becomes a splendid allegory that blends together aspects of modern-day China and its past in an amazing way that left me awestruck. Modern-day China is a cynical place and some of its cultural traditions were neglected and intentionally destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, and so the juxtaposition of past traditions being taken seriously within a cynical environment was pleasing. The aesthetic were nice.

TPW contains plenty of vividly brutal scenes that were placed there to illustrate the brutality of war and the supposed moral ambiguity on both sides and purposefully antagonises the protagonist Rin’s band of soldiers against the majority of the people within the setting. R.F. Kuang doesn’t pull any punches; though a criticism of the story was that, in a somewhat strange attempt to preserve historical accuracy within a fictionalised setting, she had chosen to explicitly painting The Federation of Mugen as a self-aware villain who does things for the sake being evil. There weren’t ANY sympathetic qualities that could be ascribed to them and it was apparent that there was no banality of evil being portrayed as there was examples of them being shown as anything but gleeful in their war tactics.

Of course, R.F. more than makes up for it by showing how a gleeful villain was made as the character arc plotted out by our protagonist becomes almost entirely parallel to the Federation of Mugen’s actions in the story. Without going into too much detail, Kuang asks the question “Is excessive revenge justified to be unleashed on bystanders simply because of their nationality because of the crimes of that nation?” This question had ended being explored with nuance within The Poppy War, however, the answer will likely only be discussed/revealed in the sequel since the story had chose to establish those meta-narratives rather than endlessly expand upon them in the story.

The Poppy War is a debut novel dealing with perhaps the most depressing contemporary story of military fantasy that I’ve ever seen outside of a Russian novel. This is also not a happy story, the world is not funny, everything is sh*t, nothing matters, we’re all going to die, monsters are real.

Also, the story doesn’t explicitly feature romance; only a borderline psychotic obsession that raises the bar for all non-anime/manga Yanderes out there. Yuno Gasai ain’t nothin’ compared to our MC, Fang Runin.

In the end, this quote in the middle of the story sums up the theme of this book: “WAR IS NOT ABOUT WHO IS RIGHT; ONLY WHO REMAINS STANDING.”

Of course, the nation Hesperia was referenced as well, but never shown to be much of an ally or enemy; only as an observer…so, essentially, a stand-in for the United States. It would be interesting to see what the author intends to explore about Hesperia within the story in the series.

This book deserves a five-stars & a 10/10 rating simply because Kuang hits all the right notes in a masterful way using strong writing and genre-savvy skills that wove an intricate story of what makes and unmakes the Hero’s journey. I would highly recommend this story to every Song of Ice & Fire fan who is (im)patiently waiting our lord and saviour GRRM to release a new book to pass the time and read this. Of course, and also to people who enjoy reading about dark coming-of-age stories that offers nuance and complex themes & AREN’T MEANT FOR KIDS TO READ.