The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

This book absolutely gutted me.

There are loads of really great elements about it - who doesn't love a good boarding school story? - but I can't get past the aspect of war. R. F. Kuang writes it saw raw and real and I am disgusted but I am supposed to be. This book sort of makes me want to claw out my eyes, for the grotesque horrors I have imagined, thanks to the precision of her writing. When I think about Kitay's story, or Venka's, it makes me sick. I'm just going to throw the trigger warnings out front, and this is just off the top of my head - self-harm, drug use, genocide, rape, war, everything?

Just. Wow.

Do note as I'm saying all this, I gave the book five stars. I would have given it ten stars. The violence and unspeakable acts build a world in the midst of war, and it's perfectly accurate for that situation. We don't want it to be accurate. We want it to be ... tidier. But war makes monsters of men (and women).

This story is incredibly powerful. I loved that good and evil were not black and white. I loved that the characters kept making terrible, irrational decisions. I loved the magic and the consequences of it. The setting, the writing... honestly, I couldn't put this one down. I devoured it in every spare moments, up until I needed to break away because I felt like I couldn't breathe. Then I would pick it back up again. It's an incredible book, but it's not for the faint of heart, so please don't go into this one expecting a cheery fantasy adventure with an Asian protagonist. It's so much more than that.