He Who Drowned the World: the epic sequel to the Sunday Times bestselling historical fantasy She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor, 2)

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A truly memorable fantasy duology that I will be thinking about for a long time to come and has set a new standard for me for what I want out of fantasy books from this point forward.

He hates the way they view him, he hates the way they discard him, he hates that they find him worthless. In She Who Became the Sun we see their similarities discussed alongside their vast differences, but in this book we are allowed to see their connections in an even sharper light. Because of this I honestly think the last 80 pages of this book would have made a thrilling third book.Stunning, powerful and complex, there are no heroes in this tale, and people knowingly do terrible things. We are allowed the clarity of their sameness, the ache of their joint wounds and sorrows, we feel the reverberations of that string pulled taut that binds them. As a cis-gendered white man I'm not the best person to say that a novel is representative, but what I appreciate here is the lived experience of the characters who struggle with social norms, expectations, and still manage to thrive or despair depending on the character. She’d spent the greater part of her life trying to escape her past, and unpleasantly sticky feelings such as grief and nostalgia still filled her with the vague urge to run.

When I was growing up in Dadu, when my father was a general of the Yuan’s central army, we spoke our own Kipchak language at home. On the other hand, Baoxiang bottled up his anguish by feeding into the delusion that he was seeking revenge on [redacted]’s ghost.

It shows us their brokenness, it shows us how fractured and desperate and damaged they are and asks us to root for them anyway. While I understand where this sentiment comes from, I’ll admit that I wasn’t overly bothered by the turn things took. chan is actually pretty great at action scenes and i'm gonna need more of that from their future work. There is clear intention behind every sentence that allows us to feel the raw emotional weight of every line.