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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I am tethered to this story like it is my centre of gravity, I can't imagine a world without having read it. although i really enjoyed and felt actively engaged while reading ‘she who became the sun,’ i suffered a major disconnect with the concluding sequel. However, there are two deaths in this book that just did not have the weight and impact I expected them to have. The story along with its dynamic characters will linger in my mind for days (probably even weeks) to come.

I wish the last chapter had been longer because there was no epilogue and I wanted to know more of what happened after the end. There is clear intention behind every sentence that allows us to feel the raw emotional weight of every line. She switched to one of the languages she’d learned in the monastery (but never practiced) and said very badly, “You can speak Uyghur, can’t you? You can feel the weight of the labour and the love that was put into this novel, yet it also reads like we're flying across the pages. However, Drowned is substantially darker in tone than She Who Became the Sun and contains one moderately detailed depiction of sexual violence.

In the end, Parker-Chan seems to suggest, power belongs not to the most ruthless but to those who are most successful at self-forgiveness. Who else understood what it was to feel something of this magnitude; to want something with the entirety of their self, as she did? Anyway, if the worst thing I can say about a book is that it brutalized my soul and made me seek the sun and, well, appreciate that I wasn't part of a court in imperial China, then you're probably good. I’m glad the book had a short summary on what happened, so it was a little easier for me to catch up. At this moment, I can’t even think of picking up a new book because I’m not ready to move on just yet.

Surely it requires no extended consideration,” the woman’s voice said from behind the stirring gauze curtain of the carriage. In terms of their arcs though, I would have to admit that Baoxiang’s was the only one which I was truly interested in. Her neighbor, the former courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband - and her powerful kingdom has the strength and resources to wipe Zhu off the map. We are as connected to them as they are to each other and so we root for this connection to hold true, for it to mean something, for it to forge a new path—a path that we can follow them down.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. For Baoxiang also desires revenge: to become the most degenerate Great Khan in history―and in so doing, make a mockery of every value his Mongol warrior family loved more than him. Young, ambitious, and in possession of the Mandate of Heaven, Zhu believes utterly in her own capacity to do anything - endure anything - that will allow her to seize the imperial throne from the Mongols and crown herself Emperor. I would recommend this duology to someone who is used to Western fantasy and wants to change scenery, likes when books start very slow-paced and character-driven and get more and more complex the more you read and appreciates having some very dramatic scenes. The characters are violent and ruthless but at the same time they show a lot of other emotions on the page such as grief, abanoment, selfdoubth and others which made the story feel very real.

I didn’t do a reread of SWBTS before this came out, so I was fully relying on my memory to help me remember important events and such. Zhu, The Radiant King, finds herself feeling unstoppable after her victories and wants to crown herself emperor.A gripping tale of rise to power, fate, betrayals and the bloody beginnings and endings of dynasties.

With a surge of delight, she said to the faceless woman behind the curtain, “I don’t want to be great.Perhaps we will stay away from "grimdark" as Parker-Chan rejects that genre categorization, as is their right, but OMG I have never read a grimmer, darker, more depressing book full of terrible people doing terrible things to one another. It reached a point where it felt more gratuitous and less relevant, which detracted from my enjoyment.