Based off “Romance of The Three Kingdoms”, this bold retelling imagines a world where people fall into the roles to which they are suited and that includes women. Indeed, the story revolves mainly around several characters of the distaff gender.
But what if your life isn’t your own? What if everything you do is written through some mandate of omnipotent but invisible gods?
Our heroine doesn’t really believe in gods (an attitude that is deeply ironic, considering what happens to her later). So she operates as if gods aren’t real. In spite of her beauty (illustrated in the front of the book along with images of Xin Ren, Lotus and Cloud), it is her myriad other talents that she brings to bear. She possesses a watchful eye that notes everything and everyone around her and comes to insightful conclusions reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. She’s intellectually brilliant, a talented zither player, a cunning strategist and a skilled negotiator. Her ability to determine what people are like and manipulate them is absolutely absorbing to read.
But other characters are not lacking. The story is filled with complicated characters, terrifying images of warfare, a sweeping vista of a foreign land (albeit one imagined by the writer) and tangled politics that require close and careful perusal on the reader’s part. The story centers around several powerful females: Xin Ren, a woman devoted to the child Empress (much spoken of but never actually glimpse on the page); Cloud, one of her swornsisters; Lotus, a simple brawler and another swornsister; Pan Qilin herself (aka the Rising Zephyr); Miasma, a rebel marauder; Cicada, the young girl barely holding on to power in the midst of a council composed of hesitant and fearful old men and Ku, Pan Qilin’s younger sister who developed a strange antipathy to her older sister.
It’s a terrific story of derring do, cool negotiation in the face of danger and, above all, the passionate ties between women. It’s one of the most riveting reads I’ve tackled this year and I highly recommend it for women and young girls. If there’s any book this year that happily speculates on the notion of what women can do when they’re free and unfettered by societal pressures, this book is it.
But what if your life isn’t your own? What if everything you do is written through some mandate of omnipotent but invisible gods?
Our heroine doesn’t really believe in gods (an attitude that is deeply ironic, considering what happens to her later). So she operates as if gods aren’t real. In spite of her beauty (illustrated in the front of the book along with images of Xin Ren, Lotus and Cloud), it is her myriad other talents that she brings to bear. She possesses a watchful eye that notes everything and everyone around her and comes to insightful conclusions reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. She’s intellectually brilliant, a talented zither player, a cunning strategist and a skilled negotiator. Her ability to determine what people are like and manipulate them is absolutely absorbing to read.
But other characters are not lacking. The story is filled with complicated characters, terrifying images of warfare, a sweeping vista of a foreign land (albeit one imagined by the writer) and tangled politics that require close and careful perusal on the reader’s part. The story centers around several powerful females: Xin Ren, a woman devoted to the child Empress (much spoken of but never actually glimpse on the page); Cloud, one of her swornsisters; Lotus, a simple brawler and another swornsister; Pan Qilin herself (aka the Rising Zephyr); Miasma, a rebel marauder; Cicada, the young girl barely holding on to power in the midst of a council composed of hesitant and fearful old men and Ku, Pan Qilin’s younger sister who developed a strange antipathy to her older sister.
It’s a terrific story of derring do, cool negotiation in the face of danger and, above all, the passionate ties between women. It’s one of the most riveting reads I’ve tackled this year and I highly recommend it for women and young girls. If there’s any book this year that happily speculates on the notion of what women can do when they’re free and unfettered by societal pressures, this book is it.