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Lottie disney bookworm (1056 KP) rated She Who Became The Sun in Books

Aug 30, 2021  
She Who Became The Sun
She Who Became The Sun
Shelley Parker-Chan | 2021
8
8.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Beware those who journey further – a fairytale this ain’t!

After a fortune teller destines her brother for greatness and her own life to be worthless, a peasant girl may be expected to resign herself to her fate. However, upon her brother’s premature death, the girl seizes an opportunity to adopt both his name and his destiny.

She Who Became the Sun is a brutal, hard hitting debut to The Radiant Emperor series. Comparisons tend to quote Mulan due to the setting and the nature of Zhu disguising her female birth, but this is honestly where the comparison ends. For me, this novel is as if Mulan was in the Game of Thrones novels: warring factions, political backstabbing and the quest for power, Parker-Chan really doesn’t hold back.

As the debut novel, She Who Became the Sun has a lot of work to do in world-building and revealing the history behind the main characters. As a result, the pace of writing can feel a little slow at times but the final few chapters are well worth any previous perseverance.

Despite the pace in the middle of the novel, Parker-Chan’s writing is lyrical and intense simultaneously. Zhu’s desire to live gives a desperate, raw undertone to every one of the chapters under her POV. This is in direct juxtaposition from our other main character, Ouyang, who exudes cold detachment.

Zhu and Ouyang are both orphans, both queer and, as a girl and a eunuch, are both shunned by society. However, they consistently find themselves facing each other on opposite sides of a war: they may be ‘like and like’ but they are both characters who believe that their path is already decided for them, and neither will let anyone stand in their way!

Zhu and Ouyang are complex, well-developed characters, but they are nothing without their stunning supporting cast! I particularly loved Xu Da, Esen and Ma who never showed any prejudice against our main protagonists and purely accepted them for who they were.

She Who Became the Sun intertwines historical fiction with fantasy, war strategies with spirits and death with fate. This novel manages to be gritty and violent whilst also exploring gender identity in an open and refreshing manner. Morality is blurred and ghosts are rife: I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Thank you to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for gifting me an e-ARC of She Who Became the Sun.
  
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Bob Mann (459 KP) rated Star Trek (2009) in Movies

Sep 28, 2021  
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek (2009)
2009 | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi
8
7.9 (68 Ratings)
Movie Rating Watch
As Leonard Nimoy says on the “making of” featurette, few directors can successfully deliver both ‘action’ and ’emotion’ in the same film, but J.J. Abrams can do. You can tell that he loved the original series, and adds both energy and ‘fan-friendly’ easter eggs into the movie:

We saw Kirk’s death in “Generations” – here we see his birth, with a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth as his heroic Dad!;
The nasty Ceti Eel creatures are back from “The Wrath of Khan”!;
We see the historic event of Kirk beating the Kobayashi Maru starfleet test;
And we see all of the key characters meeting for the first time.
There are some surprises though. The fact that Spock and Uhuru are ‘a thing’ adds a spice to the film that feels like it messes with existing Trek lore. And similarly the destruction of Vulcan – giving this the highest body count of any of the movies! – has to be explained away with the old ‘parallel timeline’ ploy.

The action scenes work well, reliving the ‘submarine warfare in space’ elements that worked so well in the original series and the “Wrath of Khan”. A ‘space drop’ onto Nero’s ‘drill’ is particularly thrilling.

The casting is just about bang on, with Chris Pine pitch perfect as Kirk and Karl Urban particularly impressive as ‘Bones’ McCoy (although the evolution of the nickname – shown here – feels overly forced). The one character that I don’t get on with here is Simon Pegg’s Scotty: might be controversial, but he just doesn’t work for me.

Finally, the music by Michael Giacchino is a favourite score of mine. Simply thrilling and brilliant. I was lucky enough to hear it played live at a showing in the Royal Albert Hall a few years back, where both Giacchino and Abrams appeared on stage – – a truly memorable evening.

It’s not perfect. The whole “transportation of Scotty into the water works” irritates me enormously for some reason. And it’s somewhat glossed over what Nero and his crew have been doing for the 25 years while Kirk grows up: (Nero: “Man, I’ve finished ALL of my Sodoku books… when is this lockdown EVER GONNA END??”). And the JJ ‘lens flare’ is used to a level here that is mind-blowingly distracting! But as a reboot, in the main, it works.