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R.F. Kuang 5 Books Collection Set: The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, The Burning God, Babel & Yellowface
Please Note That The Following Individual Books As Per Original ISBN and Cover Image In this Listing shall be Dispatched
R.F. Kuang 5 Books Collection Set (The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, The Burning God, Babel & Yellowface):
The Poppy
When Rin aced the Keju – the test to find the most talented students in the Empire – it was a shock to to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who had hoped to get rich by marrying her off;
The Dragon
Rin is on the run …Haunted by the terrible choices she had to make to save her people, Rin's only reason for living is to take revenge on the traitorous Empress who sold her homeland to its enemies. Forced to ally with the powerful Dragon Warlord in his plan to unseat the Empress.
The Burning
After saving her nation of Nikan from foreign invaders and battling the evil Empress Su Daji in a brutal civil war, Fang Runin was betrayed by allies and left for dead. Despite her losses, Rin hasn’t given up on those for whom she has sacrificed so much.
Oxford, 1836. The city of dreaming spires. It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian.
IT’S JUST NOT HERS TO TELL. When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity and takes it. So what if it means stealing Athena’s final manuscript? So what if it means ‘borrowing’ her identity?
9780008239848/9780008239893/9780008339180/9780008501853/9780008532819
R.F. Kuang 5 Books Collection Set (The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, The Burning God, Babel & Yellowface):
The Poppy
When Rin aced the Keju – the test to find the most talented students in the Empire – it was a shock to to the test officials, who couldn’t believe a war orphan from Rooster Province could pass without cheating; to Rin’s guardians, who had hoped to get rich by marrying her off;
The Dragon
Rin is on the run …Haunted by the terrible choices she had to make to save her people, Rin's only reason for living is to take revenge on the traitorous Empress who sold her homeland to its enemies. Forced to ally with the powerful Dragon Warlord in his plan to unseat the Empress.
The Burning
After saving her nation of Nikan from foreign invaders and battling the evil Empress Su Daji in a brutal civil war, Fang Runin was betrayed by allies and left for dead. Despite her losses, Rin hasn’t given up on those for whom she has sacrificed so much.
Oxford, 1836. The city of dreaming spires. It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows. Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian.
IT’S JUST NOT HERS TO TELL. When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity and takes it. So what if it means stealing Athena’s final manuscript? So what if it means ‘borrowing’ her identity?
9780008239848/9780008239893/9780008339180/9780008501853/9780008532819
Paperback
Published June 1, 2024
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About the author
R.F. Kuang
28 books86.3k followersRebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy and Babel: An Arcane History, among others. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
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July 10, 2025
Bable: five stars
The Poppy War: three stars
Read on for more.
I have only read two of the books in the collection so far, so my review is incomplete. I give Bable five stars, in part because my subjective bias kicks it over the top for me personally. I love language. I am a nurse, but I worked as an interpreter for several years. Translation is fascinating to me. This book explores linguistics in such a way that whenever someone gets upsets at translators, and tells them to "just say what I said," I can say "if you want to complain, read this first." If they laugh at me (an appropriate response) I use this hefty tome to knock them unconscious (a felony).
So, I am very biased in this book's favor. There are problems I have with this books storytelling, which would lower the score if I were less biased, to probably a four. There are things I love. The characterization of the students that start out as malleable children and then harden and have their values and abilities crystalize as they experience triumphs, traumas, and all the small moments in between. However, I have one minor problem and one more pervasive problem. I am going to spoil the problem I have with one aspect in the rest of this paragraph, so if you don't want that, skip to the next paragraph. The story is told looking backwards and with time skips, this is not a problem, however (SPOILER TIME), there is one planted time bomb that has a pitiful payoff. Early on, the core cast of kids have cemented their friendship for the first time, and we are explicitly told that this is the closest they will ever be, and in the future their relationships will start to crack before shattering entirely. This, almost comes to pass, but then it doesn't. Only one of the kids abandons the group. The rest of the group end as tight allies. Not the implosion I thought was in store. I was a little disappointed, because the implosion really could have happened, and I think it would have been more interesting. The pieces were there. However, this is not my main problem.
ONLY VERY MINOR SPOILERS FROM HERE The book uses time skips. I like this a lot. It can jump to pivotal character moments and explore those scenes, and provide a few paragraph summary of what we missed. I don't want to see months of studying, and we don't see it. I want to see the single twenty minute conversation that tears people apart or ties them together... but sometimes we don't see that either. We gloss over a few boring weeks to get to an important moment, and instead of getting dialogue and screaming and tears, we gloss over the important moment in a slightly more detailed summary. There are great conversations and character beats in this book, the author is a formidable writer, but there are scenes we don't see. There is an important day, we know it is an important day because it takes two pages instead of being lumped in with the rest of the month in a single paragraph. However, the two pages summarize the scene and tells us the characters' emotional reaction to the scene. You can't just have your characters say what they're feeling! That makes me angry! It is a frequent enough problem that it would bump this book down a level, if I didn't just love the magic system based on linguistics so damn much! Read this book as a personal favor to me, a stranger on the internet.
The other book I read was The Poppy War. I would give this book three stars. I want to give it two and a half, but that is because I loved Bable so much, and this does a similar thing, but worse. If I hadn't read Bable, then the topics in this book would have been new, and I think it may have drawn me in more, but not much more. SPOILERS AHEAD. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid them. This book does the same thing for its main character. Poor child leaves their family to go to the most elite school in the country. There are substantive differences, however it would be as if after Steven Spielberg made ET he made something I'll make up right now called Space Biped about a friendly alien that landed in a major American city in the 1990's that makes a close bond with a young boy. They would be different movies, but if Stephen Spielberg followed that path, we would be in an alternate timeline that might end with him making Spacejam. Spacejam would finally be good and I would be able to trust my childhood judgement a little bit more, but it would be disappointing after seeing ET. Unfortunately though, that is just my major personal problem, my other issue is larger and perhaps a bit more objective. In Bable, the characters come from an alternate real world timeline, so everyone sounds like their from earlier centuries, very cool. The Poppy War takes place in a slightly different reality, a little bit further removed from the real world, in a fictionalized Asian culture, instead of Bable's British culture. So, why does the dialogue sound like it's happening in 21st century United States? I also just didn't believe the characters in many scenes. The characters seem like they pick moments from their emotional character arc at random. Rin does something at the beginning of the book (when she is a frightened pauper) that would fit right in line with her character toward the end of the book (when she is a deadly warrior). Altan is extremely erratic as a leader, and not in a the pressure is getting to him way, but in a way that feels like the hand of the author saying "You loved this guy, and you still want to love him, but you can't." But I don't love him, he just doesn't feel like the same person. LARGER SPOILER, SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU WANT (or don't, I'm not even here right now, this texts just reads this way because I can't beam thoughts into your brain folds). Altan succeeded in a society that wanted to crush him, and he did so with a completely level head. Then, he is given a command and more support than he has ever had before, and in one moment, he is that same level headed guy, emotional, but able to control his emotions. Then in the next, he displays near sociopathic violence toward one of his subordinates. Meanwhile, the same thing happens in reverse to Nezha. He is an irredeemable asshole, that suddenly has wonderfully kind traits that were never hinted at before. This happens at about the halfway point in the book, and at the same time as Altan's change. It doesn't feel like interesting human drama, it feels like a bait and switch. We wanted to have cool Altan and hurt cruel Nezha, but now we have explosive, irrational Altan and saccharine Nezha. So, who gets in the boat now?... ship! Like, relationship. I get it. (I'm a reader). Like I said, it feels like a bait and switch. It seems meant to feel like we wanted one character before, and now we want the other, but what it really feels like is having four flat tertiary characters instead of two dynamic secondary characters.
Anyway, I enjoyed both books. I don't know if I'll read The Poppy War sequels, but probably not. I bought the books individually, not this collection. I would say read Bable to any fantasy reader, I would say read The Poppy War to fantasy readers who are interested in Asian myths and folklore.
As a brief note, The Poppy War came out in 2018, Bable came out in 2022. I am so freaking excited to read Yellowface (published 2023) and whatever R.F. Kuang publishes next!
The Poppy War: three stars
Read on for more.
I have only read two of the books in the collection so far, so my review is incomplete. I give Bable five stars, in part because my subjective bias kicks it over the top for me personally. I love language. I am a nurse, but I worked as an interpreter for several years. Translation is fascinating to me. This book explores linguistics in such a way that whenever someone gets upsets at translators, and tells them to "just say what I said," I can say "if you want to complain, read this first." If they laugh at me (an appropriate response) I use this hefty tome to knock them unconscious (a felony).
So, I am very biased in this book's favor. There are problems I have with this books storytelling, which would lower the score if I were less biased, to probably a four. There are things I love. The characterization of the students that start out as malleable children and then harden and have their values and abilities crystalize as they experience triumphs, traumas, and all the small moments in between. However, I have one minor problem and one more pervasive problem. I am going to spoil the problem I have with one aspect in the rest of this paragraph, so if you don't want that, skip to the next paragraph. The story is told looking backwards and with time skips, this is not a problem, however (SPOILER TIME), there is one planted time bomb that has a pitiful payoff. Early on, the core cast of kids have cemented their friendship for the first time, and we are explicitly told that this is the closest they will ever be, and in the future their relationships will start to crack before shattering entirely. This, almost comes to pass, but then it doesn't. Only one of the kids abandons the group. The rest of the group end as tight allies. Not the implosion I thought was in store. I was a little disappointed, because the implosion really could have happened, and I think it would have been more interesting. The pieces were there. However, this is not my main problem.
ONLY VERY MINOR SPOILERS FROM HERE The book uses time skips. I like this a lot. It can jump to pivotal character moments and explore those scenes, and provide a few paragraph summary of what we missed. I don't want to see months of studying, and we don't see it. I want to see the single twenty minute conversation that tears people apart or ties them together... but sometimes we don't see that either. We gloss over a few boring weeks to get to an important moment, and instead of getting dialogue and screaming and tears, we gloss over the important moment in a slightly more detailed summary. There are great conversations and character beats in this book, the author is a formidable writer, but there are scenes we don't see. There is an important day, we know it is an important day because it takes two pages instead of being lumped in with the rest of the month in a single paragraph. However, the two pages summarize the scene and tells us the characters' emotional reaction to the scene. You can't just have your characters say what they're feeling! That makes me angry! It is a frequent enough problem that it would bump this book down a level, if I didn't just love the magic system based on linguistics so damn much! Read this book as a personal favor to me, a stranger on the internet.
The other book I read was The Poppy War. I would give this book three stars. I want to give it two and a half, but that is because I loved Bable so much, and this does a similar thing, but worse. If I hadn't read Bable, then the topics in this book would have been new, and I think it may have drawn me in more, but not much more. SPOILERS AHEAD. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid them. This book does the same thing for its main character. Poor child leaves their family to go to the most elite school in the country. There are substantive differences, however it would be as if after Steven Spielberg made ET he made something I'll make up right now called Space Biped about a friendly alien that landed in a major American city in the 1990's that makes a close bond with a young boy. They would be different movies, but if Stephen Spielberg followed that path, we would be in an alternate timeline that might end with him making Spacejam. Spacejam would finally be good and I would be able to trust my childhood judgement a little bit more, but it would be disappointing after seeing ET. Unfortunately though, that is just my major personal problem, my other issue is larger and perhaps a bit more objective. In Bable, the characters come from an alternate real world timeline, so everyone sounds like their from earlier centuries, very cool. The Poppy War takes place in a slightly different reality, a little bit further removed from the real world, in a fictionalized Asian culture, instead of Bable's British culture. So, why does the dialogue sound like it's happening in 21st century United States? I also just didn't believe the characters in many scenes. The characters seem like they pick moments from their emotional character arc at random. Rin does something at the beginning of the book (when she is a frightened pauper) that would fit right in line with her character toward the end of the book (when she is a deadly warrior). Altan is extremely erratic as a leader, and not in a the pressure is getting to him way, but in a way that feels like the hand of the author saying "You loved this guy, and you still want to love him, but you can't." But I don't love him, he just doesn't feel like the same person. LARGER SPOILER, SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU WANT (or don't, I'm not even here right now, this texts just reads this way because I can't beam thoughts into your brain folds). Altan succeeded in a society that wanted to crush him, and he did so with a completely level head. Then, he is given a command and more support than he has ever had before, and in one moment, he is that same level headed guy, emotional, but able to control his emotions. Then in the next, he displays near sociopathic violence toward one of his subordinates. Meanwhile, the same thing happens in reverse to Nezha. He is an irredeemable asshole, that suddenly has wonderfully kind traits that were never hinted at before. This happens at about the halfway point in the book, and at the same time as Altan's change. It doesn't feel like interesting human drama, it feels like a bait and switch. We wanted to have cool Altan and hurt cruel Nezha, but now we have explosive, irrational Altan and saccharine Nezha. So, who gets in the boat now?... ship! Like, relationship. I get it. (I'm a reader). Like I said, it feels like a bait and switch. It seems meant to feel like we wanted one character before, and now we want the other, but what it really feels like is having four flat tertiary characters instead of two dynamic secondary characters.
Anyway, I enjoyed both books. I don't know if I'll read The Poppy War sequels, but probably not. I bought the books individually, not this collection. I would say read Bable to any fantasy reader, I would say read The Poppy War to fantasy readers who are interested in Asian myths and folklore.
As a brief note, The Poppy War came out in 2018, Bable came out in 2022. I am so freaking excited to read Yellowface (published 2023) and whatever R.F. Kuang publishes next!
Displaying 1 of 1 review