RANT REVIEW: "The Poppy War" by R.F. Kuang

Hi Steemians!

Let's rant a bit shall we? About The Poppy War, to be specific.

This book could have been a new favorite. It could have been a five star read. It could have been not torture to read. But alas.

Let's back up a bit. I went into this book with pretty high expectations given the raving reviews I'd heard and to begin with I was not disappointed.

Sure, the setup was a little (or a lot) cliché: Poor peasant girl with undeserved natural talent gets into prestigious military academy, beats out classmates with more knowledge, training and experience due to her just generally being the shit, discovers she has hidden powers and is bullied by students and teachers alike. Throw a single friend and an eccentric but likeable and secretly powerful teacher in the mix and well, you get the general plot to probably fifty million books in total.

Now, that doesn't have to be a bad thing. As I said, I reaaaally enjoyed myself for the first half of the book. Rin is very devoted to her studies and her training. Due to her upbringing she is determined to prove she deserves to be at the Academy and her motivation and thirst for praise shines through in every single one of her actions. She throws herself into her studies like crazy, resorts to something close to self-harm to stay awake at times and often reminds herself of the fate that would be hers should she be kicked out of the Academy. This is her driving force for the first section of the book and it is written in a very believable and well constructed way. Her actions make sense. There is a feeling of greater purpose, of all of this training leading up to something. She is, as such, a well written and fully formed character with flaws and strengths.

Unfortunately I eventually passed the 50% mark of the book, and this is where, well, for lack of a better term, everything goes to shit. While the first year of Rin's studies was described in a lot of detail, the author glosses over the next two years with little more than a few sentences and all of a sudden Rin has been at the Academy for a while. The war that has been looming with the Mugen has broken out. The capital is attacked, and all of a sudden every single parameter of the book changes. I am not exaggerating. From that point forward, it felt like I was reading an entirely different book. The setting changes, old characters are discarded (except for two of the more obnoxious ones) and a whole set of new characters and introduced that the author then wastes no time to actually develop. I get not wanting to start the process of character development over again in the middle of your novel. But well, that's why you generally don't switch out NINETY PERCENT OF YOUR ENTIRE CAST in one fell swoop.

As a reader, you're thrown into this "war" that was barely set up and expected to care about it. You're also supposed to work heavily on your suspension of disbelief, because otherwise you'd be reading most of the book with eyebrows raised to the ceiling (my future wrinkles are on you Ms Kuang).

Here's some questions that I have:

1. Why was Sinegard, the capital of an actual EMPIRE and seat of the most prestigious military Academy in the entire country, so poorly defended that it took an invading army all of two seconds to tear down?
2. Why do they spend so much time learning how to theorize the most outlandish tactics, but then all the tactics and strategies actually employed in the war are either extremely basic and/or plain stupid?
3. Why does our main character, who was literally top of her class in the strategy course, throw all that brain matter away the second she enters the actual war and refuses to make a single smart decision from that point forward?
4. Just in general, why is Nikara so poorly prepared for a war? All they do in the first half is talk and talk about how likely it is for Mugen to invade again. Well then, WHY DON'T YOU TRY PREPARING A LITTLE?

I could go on and on.

Essentially, the second half of this book is closer to a trashfire than a meaningful story. It's as if it was written by an entirely different person. Rin suddenly doesn't have a personality anymore, aside from flip-flopping between panic to rage to insecurity to stubbornness to hatred to not really caring. From that point forward we hear nothing more of her motivations or what she thinks needs to happen aside from her going on about how she's so scared of war. Girl, you chose to enter a military Academy. What did you think was going to happen.
Suddenly she is this empty husk of a person that's just there to relay what's left of the so-called story. And honestly, it's not much. There's fighting, sure, but who cares at this point? Most of it is written poorly, with a setting that's hard to discern or place in the greater context of a war, and the characters that have been set up to act a certain way entirely go off script and basically just fuck up. A lot.

So you see, there are bad books. You pick them up and can tell pretty quickly what you've gotten yourself into, giving you a chance to decide whether you want to waste your time on them or not. And then there a books with a better-than-average premise, that have solid writing and characters, that actually make you CARE about what's happening, and then turn around and throw it all in your face. This is infinitely worse. I don't just dislike this book. I am bitter. I hold a grudge. And I will rant about it in more detail in a video coming next Friday. So hold on to your hats...

Have you made your way through The Poppy War yet, and what did you think of it? Let me know!

Happy reading!
xx
ivymuse