This book was recommended to me, and so I picked it up. After an… Engaging beginning, (It just jumps right into everyone being racist to the main character) I decided this wasn’t going to be a light read. It wasn’t. This book is something everyone should read, not because it’s good, but because it provides a lens through which you can view imperialism and racism and sexism and general problems with today’s world, and focuses it. It focuses not simply on the individual level, but the larger one as well. It does all this within a fantasy context, and which makes an excellent allegory for real world problems.
I don’t claim that this is a historically accurate book, there is magic; but there are also true things here. Exploiting people and land for gain, the genuine belief that they are “purifying” those they steal from their home and deny access to their history. These things all happened in the real world, and this is a brutal take on it.
Unrelated, this book also goes really into language, the etymology and everything which was just wonderful and extremely fascinating. I learned more chinese transliterations and it was just fun for me!
Back to the main point of the book, R. F. Kuang so acutely not merely states, but shows the issues, and it was devastating.
The four characters the story centers around all attend the language college within Oxford, three of whom are not white, and one of which is. The conflict of views between the one person who was raised being told they were enough, but not too much, because they are a girl. She faced challenges, and she complains about them so often. Whereas the others who are never told they are enough simply suffer in silence, because they are told to.
This book’s ending destroyed my heart and soul. I wholeheartedly recommend, with the pieces left of my heart that this book didn’t rip out.