Reading this a couple of weeks ago, I wished I had got round to it sooner while also glad that I hadn't because it was good to have the energy to enjoy it. TL:DR I loved it. It's really well-written, striking characters, good description, strong dialogue, I need to go and buy a paper copy so I can flick through it properly and will be buying the second volume the moment it is published.
The story focuses on peasant girl Zhu Chongba, who faced with death by famine and bandits, and a fortune teller's word that her fate is 'nothingness' grabs her powerful survival instinct with both hands and when her brother - promised a fate of historical greatness - dies, decides to take his name and seize his destiny in an AU telling of the rise of the first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty*. So she heads off to the monastery to which his parents had promised him in infancy, where her ability to grit her teeth through pretty much anything gets her admitted in disguise as a boy, and the rest is a matter of being always clever enough, noticing enough, brilliant enough, not to get found out, whether by the abbot or the Heavens. All changes when the monastery is burned down by the Mongol powers ruling China at the time and Zhu needs to find a new way to (a) survive, and (b) fulfil her destiny. Fortunately, there's a peasant rebellion happening at the time, and war has always offered a route to advancement... The army/rebellion brings her opportunity, but also into contact/conflict/contrast with the novel's sort-of antagonist/sort-of co-protagonist, Ouyang, a Chinese general in service to the Mongol Empire, and who is one of the novels two main POVs (a third and fourth have a much smaller share)**, and shares with Zhu the fundamental issue that the novel addresses head-on: how do you survive in this world in which the only right shape of a person is that of the intact male and everyone else is, one way or the other, inferior and wrong?
Cards on the table, General Ouyang's plotline was my favourite. Of course it was! Angsty, angry, tortured antagonists drowning in UST are always going to be my favourite characters, and my goodness does Ouyang deliver on this front. Sole survivor of family extinction***, castrated and made the eunuch servant of the Mongol prince responsible for the murder of his entire family, and desperately in love with said prince's son, Lord Esen, he is a maelstrom of anger, humiliation, fury, shame, angst, filial piety, love, confusion, self-hatred, self-harm, even more anger, and excellent martial arts skills. A brilliant general fighting for the Mongols, he simultaneously plots vengeance against those who have killed his family and ruined his life, hampered only by the fact that said vengeance must inevitably involve ruining everything good he has managed to find in his own life, most especially the man he is in love with and who is blindingly obviously to the reader mad about him in return (cue denial, obviously. This is a fourteenth century China's 'man most in need of therapy', by contrast, Zhu seems positively well-adjusted). The fanfic/art writes/paints itself. The fix-it fic does not.
I'm also going to put in a good word for Lord Esen here. Yes, he can be a bit 'Tim, nice but unfortunately aristocratic' and prone to the odd clanger. But consider! He has had ten years or so of enormously mixed signals, and almost all of the time he must be saying the right thing, or Ouyang would have no problem just hating him even though he is a perfect specimen of sexy Mongolian manhood. Do we not all sometimes make a crass remark that is intended as a connection but falls excruciatingly wrongly? But the rest of us have a hope of getting answered back and told it was hurtful and then not repeating it, rather than it being taken silently as fuel to the misery fire, because something needs to counter all the really nice things about this person. Yes, I like Esen, damn it, and goodness knows, he doesn't care any less about the starving multitudes than the other leads.
In terms of elements that worked less well for me, I would probably have preferred it entirely as alternate history rather than historical fantasy, as I didn't find much added by the latter; I wasn't suprised to learn that it was added relatively late in the day, and while I came to appreciate the ghosts I would have been fine without them and found the literal element of the Mandate of Heaven rather simplistic. While it's a book with a fair amount of death in it, I could have really done without one scene of graphic violence that I realised was going to happen too late to skip forward (downside of reading as opposed to TV, the visual effect is not lessened by reading it with half-closed eyes), and didn't find a graphic sex scene quite fit the tone. Also, if you're going to have a graphic f/f sex scene, the choice of using a cliché euphemism instead of the word clitoris*** is rather an odd one.
The balance of the novel is also perhaps a bit less successful in the second half. Zhu is not an entirely sympathetic character. She begins as one, as a starving child living on her wits, but develops as a character fundamentally driven by a combination of terror and desire for power, with the latter gradually giving way to greater confidence in the possibility of the latter. While Ma - her love interest - is a sympathetic character, and gets some POV sections, she's not driving the plot and fairly passive in terms of events, and as things went on I felt Zhu's sections less compelling in comparison to Ouyang, who in comparison to basically decent Ma and very contained Zhu, is having BIG FEELINGS all over the page. But these are relatively minor quibbles with an otherwise very impressive book. Recommended.
As for me, I've a ticket to a Waterstones livestream tomorrow after work with the author and a couple of others (who I haven't heard of, sorry other authors). Can't wait.
* Full marks to the author of a brief summary of his life who entitled it 'The Man Who Would be Ming'.
**Apparently Parker-Chan started off with a lot more different POVs, and dropped them as part of acknowledging that even if she was inspired by Cdramas - which certainly shows -a novel needs writing differently. I'm sure that was the right choice, but nonetheless I would have loved some chapters from Wang Baoxiang's POV and really hope we get that in the second volume. I loved his 'I (and you) really ought to have been born 300 years ago' comment to another character. Actually, he ought to have been born in the Vorkosiverse.
***Is there any historical example of a survivor of family extinction going on to wreak their terrible revenge? It seems unlikely, given that the whole point is to prevent that. Though I'd read the story in which someone thinks "Forget vengeance, my dad was a total shit anyway. I'm going to seize any opportunities that come to me for a decent life in the future.'
****Which would have been less obvious had the word intestine not been used in a previous chapter, so it couldn't be justified as avoiding modern anatomical terms. Mary Renault would not have written clitoris, but she'd also have known to make it less obvious by replacing intestine with gut or bowel.
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