They condemn him because he is no warrior, yet their own true warriors are more like what they think of him than he is. Shelley Parker-Chan has not only created an exceptional piece of literature through their immersive and explosive storytelling, but has transported us through time into a world where we are as desperate and as ravenous as the characters themselves. In that sense, the novel succeeds immensely, but to someone struggling with their identity I think that this type of book will resonate. Two winged helmets in the Nanren style, two sets of lamellar armor with the dark leather taking in the sun and the metal lion’s-head bosses on their shoulders sending it flashing back like mirror signals.

We see the biting edge of a pain that is weaponised against the world and we see a maddening one that is sure to be their doom. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to really immerse myself into this because it had been a while since I’d read SWBTS.The beginning of part three has a line that would have been the perfect cliffhanger ending to this book (I don't know why I would want that but it would have been awesome). Recasting Chinese myth and history with a fantastical twist, the follow-up to Parker-Chan's lauded She Who Became the Sun finds the Radiant King Zhu Yuanzhang forced into an uneasy alliance with an embittered eunuch general in a determined bid to be crowned Emperor. Parker-Chan has secured their place with great surety as one of my absolute favourite authors, I will clamour for any scraps of writing they deign to give us. I acknowledge the justification behind his hatred for women but it’s not something I can easily overlook. The only way for Zhu to defeat Madam Zhang is to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the beautiful, traitorous eunuch general Ouyang.

I don’t know if this is what happened with the real life Zhu Yuanzhang, but it kind of bogged the book down at points and there were several times I thought that the sole reason for an event was simply to stop Zhu reaching the capital too early since, at that point, the book would have been over.In terms of violence, I think of both She Who Became the Sun and He Who Drowned the World as roughly equivalent to the Asian historical dramas on Netflix: you'll see some splatter during fight scenes, but rarely full-on gore. Ouyang’s seriousness and self-hatred paired with Zhu’s lightheartedness and radical self-acceptance and them being each other’s mirrors and being connected by fate and understanding each other in a way nobody else could like ughhhh!