The Poppy War is a dark fantasy war story in which embracing power holds the inherent risk of losing oneself. Its pacing is smooth as silk, its world rich, and its characters consistent and believable. The main character, Rin, is sympathetic and active. She never fails to grasp at chances to improve her station in life, and it is frequently a joy to see what Rin does next.
The tone is varyingly grim at different points in the story. Notably, the beginning feels like it’s laying it on a little thick with its copious details about how difficult life is for Rin (and the people of her province). But if that weren’t there, it’d probably feel jarring when the war finally breaks out in the second half of the book and things get exponentially more bleak. The middle portion where Rin is a student at a military academy is so light by comparison that it almost feels like the premise has changed. Of course that’s not the case: the war draws many of its details from the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the story is painstakingly packed with parallels from so early on that even an uninformed reader with only passing historical knowledge, like myself, will quickly identify which culture is which and what their roles will be when the war breaks out. The fact that it feels abrupt despite all the buildup is a demonstration of R.F. Kuang’s considerable skills as an author.
Still, I can’t help but feel very disappointed by the book. Its momentous narrative thrust brings Rin to a very interesting material and emotional state at the end. And then it abruptly stops. While the story certainly does end some portion of an arc effectively, I wouldn’t say it tells a full story. The central themes don’t conclude, the characters are posed mid-stride as if this were only one-half or one-third of their epic, and the setting doesn’t get a chance to settle after several world-shattering events.
I’m not complaining about a sequel-bait ending. It’s not that. Four out of five fantasy novels have that. What bothers me is that I read probably a hundred pages toward the end of horrifying war crimes that paralleled some of the worst things human beings have ever done, that were directly based on real world horrors, stomach-churning acts of violence that other human beings were actually on the receiving end of… and then the book doesn’t even manage to finish saying anything about it. The Poppy War is a half-finished sentence written in the ashes of tens of millions of corpses: “And in the next book…”
The worst thing is I feel like a jerk for even saying it. That I suddenly found it all very offensive at the end shocked me, and the stellar writing is probably a big factor. It’s clear that the author has enormous respect for the real-life tragedies that the story is based upon, and is knowledgeable about the history. So the fact that it ends up feeling like a footnote to Rin’s future adventures in the next installation is more jarring than anything else within the story. But I don’t want to be harsh: it’s very possible that the sequels tie everything together in a way that feels meaningful and satisfying. As a standalone novel though, it feels garish to me.
Content warning: detailed accounts of rape, murder, genocide, abusive relationships, torture, human experimentation, casual racism, and nonconsensual drug use (this is not an exhaustive list)
Plot: 7
Characters: 7
Themes: 7
Prose: 7
Overall score: two bids, but one is much more prestigious than the other.
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