Shelley Parker-Chan concludes her fantastical account of the meteoric rise of Zhu Yuanzhang in He Who Drowned the World. (The first book of the duology is She Who Became the Sun.) In Parker-Chan’s version of events, Zhu is the unloved daughter of a poor farming family who “stole” her brother’s fate after the death of all her relatives. In disguise as a boy, Zhu badgered a monastery into feeding and teaching her until they were destroyed by agents of the Yuan Dynasty. That didn’t stop the driven Zhu: she manages to fight her way to the top of a rebel army. In this concluding volume, we see Zhu’s audacity in full force as she battles the Yuan Emperor and everyone else who claims to hold the Mandate of Heaven...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.