Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Personally timely

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Bingo Row 3 – I The first thing I noticed about Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao was that the book was dedicated to Rebecca Schaeffer. That set a strong tone for the book. It indicated that the author felt some strong connection with a long dead actress whose death influenced stalking laws, and it indicated that the topics would be about how society and men treat women and celebrities. It turns out the book was dedicated to a different Rebecca Schaeffer than the one […]

Let’s Not Ship Toxic Men

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Heavenly Tyrant, the sequel to Iron Widow, picks up immediately after the first book finishes, and the long ago Emperor Qin Zheng is awake now and won’t be dying of the plague he was certainly dying from. He is immediately accepted as the ruler of Huaxia, and has absolute power. Zetian marries him, and they implement what seems to have parallels to the rise of Communist China and Mao Zedong. He strips wealthy folks of their lands to redistribute and he imprisons and executes many […]

Rage Against the Machine

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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This review contains some mild spoilers which I think are given away in the book jacket. Iron Widow is a YA story set in a future city of Chinese inspired Huaxia where men and women pilot mecha type suits to protect the population from aliens around the Great Wall. The suits are called Chrysalises, and the pilot, a man, teams up with a woman in the back in a merging of energy and minds that usually result in the woman’s death. This is how the […]

Robots, monsters, and medieval, chinese culture

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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I first encountered Xiran Jay Zhao via twitter when friends linked to her takedown of the 2020 Mulan film (well worth watching – the takedown, not the movie) so when I read that she was writing a novel that built on Medieval Chinese concepts with giant robots and monsters/kaiju I was obviously going to read it. In Iron Widow we see a patriarchal society in which women are very much second class citizens. For most it’s marriage and hope you get a good husband. And […]

He will not kill me. He does not get to make me a statistic.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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You cannot appease someone into loving or respecting you. ― Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow I chose this book because I saw it reviewed on CBR14 and damn, did it look interesting. Feminist wrath? Yes, please. To sum it up, Wu Zetian is angry. Not just a little pissed, but vengeful and rightly so. In her world, humanity is in a centuries-long battle with the Hundans, an alien species which invaded their planet. The only way to keep the Hundans from overtaking the entire planet is to […]

I love everything this book chooses to be. #CBRBINGO – Font

Iron Widow (Iron Widow, #1) by Xiran Jay Zhao

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“How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born. You tell them they’re weak. You tell them they’re prey. You tell them over and over, until it’s the only truth they’re capable of living.” This book is a scream of rage into the night, and I’m so glad it got published. Even if you don’t normally read YA, I would urge you to […]



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