cahn

Oh boy. Let's see. Content warnings include (but are not necessarily limited to, these are just the ones I can remember offhand) genocide(s), massacre (in particular describing the remains of a massacre, somewhat graphic, includes death of children and babies), war violence in general, experimentation on human beings, drug addiction, fairly graphic conversation about rape (though the pov character is not raped and no on-screen rape is shown). Basically, the book is modeled on the actual Second Sino-Japanese War, so, you know. With all that said I'm not entirely sure that I would exactly say it has a pessimistic/hopeless atmosphere -- the ending is, hmm, not positive at all really (it's the first book in a trilogy, so it's not clear how it's going to go), and it is strongly indicated that the protagonist has made an extremely bad (probably even catastrophic) decision, but she never gives up or entirely loses hope herself, which distinguishes it for me from, oh, the third Hunger Games book, or anything by K.J. Parker, say, both of which made me want to throw the book across the room (which this book didn't do).

All that being said, if you are not in the mood for dark but are interested in checking it out (are you voting in the Hugos?) I would just read the first section and leave it at that. The first section is actually pretty upbeat (think Ender's Game meets Chinese-inflected fantasy) and I don't think any content warnings apply -- hmm, the protagonist does end up drinking a potion to get rid of her periods (and thus render herself infertile) but I'm having a hard time thinking of anything worse. Discussion of previous genocide, I guess.