He Who Drowned the World

I enjoyed reading this book. I think it's pretty good. It concludes in a reasonably satisfying way. I have some caveats though.

First, it's kind of unclear why we would expect Zhu to be a better leader than, say, Wang Baoxiang. He has experience of administration, education... Wang does a lot of bad things to get his chance to be emperor, but then, Zhu is also responsible for a lot of deaths of people under her command. Particularly in the second half of the book, I often found myself asking "What would actually be the best outcome for the people?" and it was never super clear that the answer was that Zhu's being emperor would be best. It's also kind of unclear why either of Wang or Zhu wants to be emperor. Maybe having the Mandate just makes you want that? Like, what happens when Zhu becomes emperor? Why is she the one best capable of rebuilding the years of devastation that she is in part responsible for? Is there any reason to think that preventing Wang (or, for that matter, the Zhangs) from becoming emperor will materially improve anyone's lives?

Lots of people die as a result of Zhu's actions and ambition. It's never really clear why she evinces such loyalty in the people who follow her. Or rather, who follow the man she is pretending to be: it's never really explored what might happen if he gender became common knowledge.

Speaking of gender, this book seems to have gender as one of its central themes. Zhu is pretending to be a man, Ouyang is a eunuch, Wang is hated for his effeminacy, Lady Zhang works through manipulating the men in her life because she can't hold power directly. Given that, it does surprisingly little with the idea. There's no suggestion that Zhu or Wang might be trans or non-binary. (I mean, I guess you could read it in there between the lines if you wanted to, but I don't think there's much in the text to suggest it).

Zhu's wife was an interesting character in the previous book. She is almost completely absent from this book, until she is required to make terrible sacrifices for the benefit of Zhu's ambition. I feel very sorry for her.

Don't get the wrong idea: I enjoyed this book, and raising these criticisms is evidence that I thought about the story. It's well written and the worldbuilding is engaging.

When I finished She Who Became The Sun, I was disappointed to have to wait for this sequel, I had loved that volume so much. But this one really didn't draw me in in the same way.

I'll start with parts I did enjoy. Parker-Chan is a great writer, both as a conjurer of scenes, and in the way they draw characters richly by switching between interior perspectives and the perceptions of others. The arc of Zhu and Ouyang haltingly moving towards understanding each other is compelling until it's cut short, and the "Zhu's capers" scenes are just as much fun as in the first volume.

But I found the shifting motivations of the characters took a lot of interest out of this oen. Wang and Ouyang felt flattened by their hyperfixation on revenge at all costs. Madame Zhang's fixation with the self-imprisoning role of Empress when she had so much real power as Queen makes no sense. Zhu's shift from desperate, audacious attempts to survive to grasping at "greatness" apparently for its own sake had the odd effect of making the stakes seem smaller even as the story gets bigger, which makes the violence feel gratuitous in turn, in a way that it never did in the first volume no matter how grim things got. And Ma and Xu both seemed shrunk by their portrayal as basically martyrs for the revolution.

I spent much of the book wondering why Zhu and Zhang couldn't just come to some detente and enjoy their successes, and why anyone other than Xu Da and maybe Ma Yinzi followed Zhu with such loyalty. Towards the end Ma has some lines which seem to explain it in a sort of social justice way, but coming so late in the book they felt tacked on.

I'm still looking forward to the next thing Parker-Chan writes, but found this one kind of a let-down.

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