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Lottie disney bookworm (1056 KP) rated She Who Became The Sun in Books
Aug 30, 2021
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.
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.
ClareR (5849 KP) rated The Dictator’s Wife in Books
Mar 8, 2022
The Dictator’s Wife drew me in from the first page. I was utterly gripped by this claustrophobic-feeling story about the wife of a deposed (and dead) dictator.
Laura Lāzārescu’s parents had escaped Yanussia and its oppressive regime when she was a small child. Yanussian wasn’t spoken in the house, Yanussia wasn’t spoken about at all. So when Laura is asked to go to Yanussia with her law firm to represent Marija Popa, the wife of the country’s former dictator, her parents aren’t at all happy.
Marija is firm in her innocence. But is she really innocent? She’s accused of money laundering and human rights abuses, but she repeatedly paints a picture of herself as that of the nations mother. This is a woman with charisma, and you know when she has entered a room. She uses her femininity like a weapon - people do what she want them to with little effort on her part (or so it appears).
And Laura is affected by her. What makes it more interesting, is that Marija knows Laura’s mother - something that Laura has no knowledge of.
There’s a feeling of dread running throughout this book: Laura and her colleagues can’t leave the grounds without an escort, the building itself has secrets, and it’s as though those secrets are oozing from the walls. It feels like Laura is being constantly watched.
Everyone in this novel has secrets: Laura’s parents, her colleagues, the Yanussian lawyer, Marija’s sister, and most importantly, Marija herself. Family is an important theme: Marija is adopted, but even her adopted sister is clearly covering up for her. Laura’s family has pretty much destroyed itself as her parents keep their secrets from her.
Other themes are secrets, gender roles, stereotypes within those roles and the role of the media and social media in particular. Social media is a big driver behind the attitudes of the people towards Marija, and the media itself fuels this.
Laura just wants to find out the secrets that her parents won’t tell her, but will she be able to before she has to leave?
I’d most certainly recommend this book, and I’m really looking forward to reading more from Freya Berry in the future. Many thanks to Hayley @Shelflyfe and @Headline books for my prize-winning copy.
Laura Lāzārescu’s parents had escaped Yanussia and its oppressive regime when she was a small child. Yanussian wasn’t spoken in the house, Yanussia wasn’t spoken about at all. So when Laura is asked to go to Yanussia with her law firm to represent Marija Popa, the wife of the country’s former dictator, her parents aren’t at all happy.
Marija is firm in her innocence. But is she really innocent? She’s accused of money laundering and human rights abuses, but she repeatedly paints a picture of herself as that of the nations mother. This is a woman with charisma, and you know when she has entered a room. She uses her femininity like a weapon - people do what she want them to with little effort on her part (or so it appears).
And Laura is affected by her. What makes it more interesting, is that Marija knows Laura’s mother - something that Laura has no knowledge of.
There’s a feeling of dread running throughout this book: Laura and her colleagues can’t leave the grounds without an escort, the building itself has secrets, and it’s as though those secrets are oozing from the walls. It feels like Laura is being constantly watched.
Everyone in this novel has secrets: Laura’s parents, her colleagues, the Yanussian lawyer, Marija’s sister, and most importantly, Marija herself. Family is an important theme: Marija is adopted, but even her adopted sister is clearly covering up for her. Laura’s family has pretty much destroyed itself as her parents keep their secrets from her.
Other themes are secrets, gender roles, stereotypes within those roles and the role of the media and social media in particular. Social media is a big driver behind the attitudes of the people towards Marija, and the media itself fuels this.
Laura just wants to find out the secrets that her parents won’t tell her, but will she be able to before she has to leave?
I’d most certainly recommend this book, and I’m really looking forward to reading more from Freya Berry in the future. Many thanks to Hayley @Shelflyfe and @Headline books for my prize-winning copy.
Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated American War in Books
Sep 27, 2017
Amazing character development (1 more)
All-too plausible future
An amazing debut dystopia
By now you probably know there are a few things I tend to enjoy in novels. Dystopias, Fantasies, Debut Novels, and Diversity tend to peak my interest, and American War is a dystopian debut novel by an Egyptian-Canadian author.
And it’s FANTASTIC.
El Akkad did an absolutely amazing job of weaving together the North/South rivalry of the US, climate change, the changing nature of energy generation, and US wars in the middle east to write an all-too-plausible novel about the US, seventy years from now.
Alternating between narrative chapters following his protagonist, and “historical documents” about the time period, he masterfully tells the story of how a terrorist is made. Because that’s what Sarat, his protagonist, is. Let’s make no bones about that. She is a terrorist. But she is a terrorist whose reasoning makes sense to us. Perhaps because the territories and the peoples are familiar to us, perhaps because we see how she grew up and what drove her to it – but the end result is a terrorist act on an unheard-of scale.
I’d like to think this book would make people look at refugees and terrorists in a new light – with more understanding and compassion and maybe with ideas to help actually combat the attitudes and circumstances that lead to terrorist acts. But I doubt it. I doubt this will change any minds that don’t already understand the underlying reasons.
My only quibble with this book is while he manages to weave together so many other issues facing our country right now, he doesn’t really wrap in racism. And I have a hard time believing our country is past racism 70 years from now.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find the protagonist is a bisexual, gender non-conforming woman of color. How awesome is that? And her bisexuality isn’t mentioned, it’s shown, her one on-screen sex scene (and it’s only barely on-screen) being with a woman. (She’s also attracted to a man in the book.)
The author was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, and lived in Canada, earning at least one award for his investigative reporting while working at The Globe and Mail. He’s one of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s 17 writers to watch this year, and I see why. American War is definitely one of my favorite books of 2017.
You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.wordpress.com
And it’s FANTASTIC.
El Akkad did an absolutely amazing job of weaving together the North/South rivalry of the US, climate change, the changing nature of energy generation, and US wars in the middle east to write an all-too-plausible novel about the US, seventy years from now.
Alternating between narrative chapters following his protagonist, and “historical documents” about the time period, he masterfully tells the story of how a terrorist is made. Because that’s what Sarat, his protagonist, is. Let’s make no bones about that. She is a terrorist. But she is a terrorist whose reasoning makes sense to us. Perhaps because the territories and the peoples are familiar to us, perhaps because we see how she grew up and what drove her to it – but the end result is a terrorist act on an unheard-of scale.
I’d like to think this book would make people look at refugees and terrorists in a new light – with more understanding and compassion and maybe with ideas to help actually combat the attitudes and circumstances that lead to terrorist acts. But I doubt it. I doubt this will change any minds that don’t already understand the underlying reasons.
My only quibble with this book is while he manages to weave together so many other issues facing our country right now, he doesn’t really wrap in racism. And I have a hard time believing our country is past racism 70 years from now.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find the protagonist is a bisexual, gender non-conforming woman of color. How awesome is that? And her bisexuality isn’t mentioned, it’s shown, her one on-screen sex scene (and it’s only barely on-screen) being with a woman. (She’s also attracted to a man in the book.)
The author was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar, and lived in Canada, earning at least one award for his investigative reporting while working at The Globe and Mail. He’s one of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s 17 writers to watch this year, and I see why. American War is definitely one of my favorite books of 2017.
You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.wordpress.com