This is not a kind book. But it is brilliant. It’s hard to read, it’s heartbreaking. R.F. Kuang does such a great job of making me care, making me feel connected to these characters and their stories. There are stories you read that you enjoy, and there are stories that change you. It is hard to explain to people who don’t read that the characters I have read in this book are like real people to me. 

I had known about this book for years. I heard what everyone said about how intense and unforgettable it is, but I didn’t really realize. I read on the back of it what the story would be but there was no way I could know what was going to happen inside of it.

I have always paid a great deal of attention to history. It was always my favorite subject in school. I could never remember the periodic table but I knew the names of King Henry’s wives and the expanse of the Roman Empire at 14 years old. So I was quick to recognize that Kuang was citing the Rape of Nanjing when Rin and the Cike go to Golyn Niis; however, knowing the facts of the history is completely different than being immersed in the experience. It’s different to know the characters, to feel their feelings, to walk around the massacre with them.

I had learned about the Nanjing Massacre in school. I know that it’s considered one of the worst devastations of the modern era. I know it’s called the forgotten Holocaust of World War II. I even know that most people don’t really know about it because most schools just glance over it. Kuang writes a note in the back of the book that she wrote her master’s thesis on the massacre and the complicated remembrance of it. She had read a significant amount of the history, the stories of the tragedies, even talking to her own grandparents about their experience in World War II. It is this attention to detail that allows Kuang to write the story she does.

It is the knowledge that the two greatest tragedies in the story — the scenes of Golyn Niis and the battle at Khurdalain — actually happened that make it so painful. Obviously, the fantastical pieces of the story are Kuang’s artistic liberties. The destruction, devastation and death that make up those scenes, however, are a part of our very recent human history. Even knowing this as facts didn’t prepare me for the emotional force of Kuang’s writing. By the time these scenes occurred, I was so invested in the characters, their survival and success, that I felt their heartbreak as if I watched it with my own two eyes. 

There is such raw brutality in this story. There is no rest, no reprieve from the exhausting devastation. This is the kind of thing that history class with facts and figures can’t teach.

Ron feels continuously un- or under-prepared for what she does, yet she never stops. She is not the normal hero of a fantasy story. Not because of her level of preparedness — it’s a familiar enough trope to throw the hero into action before she’s ready — rather, her anger, both outward and inward, is quite singular compared to the stories I’ve read. Her anger is unceasing, the depth of it only growing with every new experience.

We begin the story knowing Rin as an angry child who wished to be anywhere but where she was. So desperate to get away that she endures self-inflicted pain to make sure she succeeds in her one and only chance at escaping the horrible future in front of her. We end with Rin as a brutal Shaman and warrior, holding within her the anger of generations of her people who were colonized and killed all for the gain of those who didn’t care for them at all. Pawns in someone else’s game.

The most horrible part of the whole book, in my opinion, is Altan’s story and Rin’s final thoughts on him. This is also what makes Rin such an unlikely and uncomfortable hero. Or maybe she isn’t a hero at all, I haven’t decided yet. Altan was a mythically strong and competent fighter, he was Rin’s idol and inspiration; yet, she ends the book stuck on the thought of him as weak for not being able to commit the atrocities she’s about to.

Rin knew of the death and destruction that was brought upon her people, she felt the anguish and pain first hand when she returned to the island. Rin’s desire for retribution and vengeance for what happened convinces her to then herself bring death and destruction to an entire people. She ends the war with the devastation she brings. But was she right to do it? Only Rin was able to do what she did. Rin and Altan’s power came from an anger intertwined with generational trauma. 

Altan sacrificed himself to destroy a monstrous entity that played with human lives as though they were dolls to manipulate and experiment on. Rin sacrificed her sanity and morality to avenge the lives of thousands who did nothing except to be born on that one island, within that one culture. But Rin did not just sacrifice herself, as Altan did. She took the lives of thousands who were innocent, deeming her need to enact her own justice to be worth more than their lives. Her very own kangaroo court, weighing the scales of how much destruction is allowed, how many lives on each side of the war are acceptable to sacrifice. It is not so easy to answer if she is good or bad, right or wrong. 

My favorite part of the book was the Phoenix god’s demand that Rin acknowledge that everything she did was her own choice. Rin is no victim, and her thirst for vengeance is not nearly quenched. The moral relativism introduced in Rin’s determination of what is just and fair based on her thoughts and feelings at any given moment creates an anxious setting for the next book, which I am so excited to start.