He Who Drowned the World (Parker-Chan)
Dec. 16th, 2023 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn4/5. This book is a sequel and conclusion to She Who Became the Sun and chronicles the further adventures of Zhu Yuanzhang, who took her dead brother's fate and is now the Radiant King, and whose inexorable ambition is driving her to further heights; the despised scholar Wang Baoxiang, whose inexorable desire for revenge is driving him to play ever-more fraught court games; Madame Zhang, whose inexorable ambition to be the wife of the Emperor is fueling all kinds of wars and intrigues; the haunted (both figuratively and literally) General Ouyang, whose inexorable desire for revenge drives him onwards.
If this sounds like it could be wildly exciting and compelling, you will be pleased to know that it in fact is! Shelly Parker-Chan is a very good writer and does all of these storylines justice; her writing is very compelling. More than its predecessor, it reads very much to me like a cdrama -- I was reminded a lot of watching Nirvana in Fire, not because any of the characters are particularly similar, but just in terms of the plot twists and the plot drama and so on.
If this sounds like everyone in this book is incredibly intense, then you are also correct! Sometimes while reading it I felt almost on the edge of burnout just reading it because everyone was always working at 100% capacity because they were so intense about what they wanted! Which is in large part the point -- that when you want something that much, the world will (at least to a certain extent) warp around that -- but not being that kind of intense myself, I was sometimes like, "wow, have you ever thought about getting a hobby??" (Unsurprisingly, the once or twice that one of the characters does have a hobby, it is swiftly co-opted in service of Ambition and Drama.)
I do highly recommend that if you are like me and have forgotten everything that happened in She Who Became the Sun, to reread that one first. I spent way too long being a bit lost (but still enjoying myself) because I didn't do that. Most books I feel like I don't have to reread previous ones, but this one is so intense that would really have helped.
I do feel like I would have liked it more had I read it before I read the Scholomance books or Some Desperate Glory. Both those books are very concerned with what it means to come to understand and help other people, and also with the mindset of "you know what? It's not enough to just save the two people we like." These books are not so concerned with that. (Which is fine! But admittedly less super pushing my thematic buttons.) I felt that 98% of the book was everyone going "Zhu Yuanzhang, you GO with that ambition!" and not until pretty late in the book does Zhu even start considering anything else, and it's only literally the last few pages where the book deals with these questions head-on. At the end of Sun I had thought that Zhu's overwhelming ambition was careening towards disaster in some way or another, and there's a certain extent to which that's true in Drowned, but the narrative always seems to be very much on Zhu's side. Which makes it a much much more upbeat book than, say, the Baru Cormorant books, which I did very much appreciate! But also it often seemed like Zhu was getting off too easy.
If this sounds like it could be wildly exciting and compelling, you will be pleased to know that it in fact is! Shelly Parker-Chan is a very good writer and does all of these storylines justice; her writing is very compelling. More than its predecessor, it reads very much to me like a cdrama -- I was reminded a lot of watching Nirvana in Fire, not because any of the characters are particularly similar, but just in terms of the plot twists and the plot drama and so on.
If this sounds like everyone in this book is incredibly intense, then you are also correct! Sometimes while reading it I felt almost on the edge of burnout just reading it because everyone was always working at 100% capacity because they were so intense about what they wanted! Which is in large part the point -- that when you want something that much, the world will (at least to a certain extent) warp around that -- but not being that kind of intense myself, I was sometimes like, "wow, have you ever thought about getting a hobby??" (Unsurprisingly, the once or twice that one of the characters does have a hobby, it is swiftly co-opted in service of Ambition and Drama.)
I do highly recommend that if you are like me and have forgotten everything that happened in She Who Became the Sun, to reread that one first. I spent way too long being a bit lost (but still enjoying myself) because I didn't do that. Most books I feel like I don't have to reread previous ones, but this one is so intense that would really have helped.
I do feel like I would have liked it more had I read it before I read the Scholomance books or Some Desperate Glory. Both those books are very concerned with what it means to come to understand and help other people, and also with the mindset of "you know what? It's not enough to just save the two people we like." These books are not so concerned with that. (Which is fine! But admittedly less super pushing my thematic buttons.) I felt that 98% of the book was everyone going "Zhu Yuanzhang, you GO with that ambition!" and not until pretty late in the book does Zhu even start considering anything else, and it's only literally the last few pages where the book deals with these questions head-on. At the end of Sun I had thought that Zhu's overwhelming ambition was careening towards disaster in some way or another, and there's a certain extent to which that's true in Drowned, but the narrative always seems to be very much on Zhu's side. Which makes it a much much more upbeat book than, say, the Baru Cormorant books, which I did very much appreciate! But also it often seemed like Zhu was getting off too easy.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-16 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-18 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 02:11 am (UTC)Haha!
I really enjoyed She Who Became the Sun, but, yeah. They all could have done with a soothing hobby.
I want to read this sequel at some point when I have more brain, but I appreciated you saying this:
At the end of Sun I had thought that Zhu's overwhelming ambition was careening towards disaster in some way or another, and there's a certain extent to which that's true in Drowned, but the narrative always seems to be very much on Zhu's side.
-- because Zhu pretty much lost me at the thing with the Prince of Radiance, so if the narrative is rooting for her, it's good for me to be prepared for that.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-19 05:10 am (UTC)Yeah, my biggest problem was how much the narrative was rooting for her. I wasn't expecting that at the end of Sun.