Jessica

Almost as soon as I started reading this book, I was relieved: it's much better than the last one. Where The Dragon Republic disappointed and frustrated me for depicting Rin as a hero when many of her actions (like genociding the Mugenese) are so clearly evil, The Burning Godimmediately makes clear that Fang Runin is a real villain-protagonist. I was so thrilled by this reframing that my renewed enthusiasm kept me going for a good long while.

To the extent that I didn't enjoy this book, it was mainly because it was very long, and there was a constant whirlwind of neverending but repetitive activity to fill the pages. I'll admit, as I said in the last review, that some of this is on me for reading a military fantasy when I'm not keen on military strategy. But then there was also – without wanting to spoil anything specific – the long, sorry situation with Nezha, multiple rounds of trusting people before inevitably being betrayed... while I was reading it (for most of the book) I was happily along for the ride, but at the end I look back and just feel overwhelmed by everything that happened. A lot of individual characters had arcs that finished unsatisfyingly. The ending also suffered a bit from pacing – there was a “fake climax” just close enough to the end that I thought it might've been the real climax, so then everything afterwards felt like a really drawn-out and overlong “falling action” section, until nearly 100 pages later it became clear there was going to be another, real climax. Then once we got there, I had very mixed feelings about that real ending. On the one hand, I think it's perfectly fitting for the character of Fang Runin that even once the war is over she can't get over her paranoia, or turn her mindset to reconstruction. On the other hand, it did make the events of nearly the entire book feel pointless, if she was just going to hand control over the country to Nezha so easily. What was all the destruction for, then?! But you know, I guess the core of the trilogy is Rin's rise and fall rather than the state of the land around her.

I want to be fair, though. Pretty much everything that I said I wanted to see in my review of the last book was, in fact, present. For the majority of the book, I was deeply engaged and clicking through pages like nobody's business. And it's also notable that this book puts a very Chinese spin on the fantasy genre, with a wonderful skewering of Western, Christian colonialism in the Hesperians, and drawing extensively on Chinese history, culture and geography. Everything to do with the setting, including the magic system and the gods, was super interesting to me. And overall, I think this has been the best-written and most enjoyable instalment of the trilogy (not quite enough for me to give it a higher rating than the three stars I gave The Poppy War, though). If you've read the first two books, you have every reason to finish the series off.

Review originally posted on my homepage.

Loved this book! I'm such a sucker for the character archetype that “the Dragon” represents, kind of harsh and menacing but ultimately on the side of good. I really enjoyed the dynamic between him and Agnieszka, the protagonist, where she's initially his prisoner but a sexual tension develops as she learns magic and the two learn to cast it in harmony with each other. The main storyline, involving court intrigue and the struggle against the advancing Wood, was good too (and I appreciated that this was NOT a “feudalism was great, actually” fantasy book) but it was really that scintillating relationship that kept me engaged.

Despite a slow start, this proved to be a fun book. Amina al-Sirafi herself is a great, unconventional, adventure hero. She's a forty-something mediaeval Muslim woman, a single mother, and at the novel's beginning a reformed character: a retired pirate captain who's given up the grog and her past habit of making poor choices in men. But of course she gets sucked back into the game, and basically in the form of a fantastical heist novel, she gets the old crew back together for one last mission... which turns into the first of five last missions because this is the first instalment of a series.

So, in this instalment, Amina is offered a more-than-life-changing amount of money to retrieve the teenage grandchild of a fabulously wealthy woman, who has apparently been kidnapped. As if the money weren't enough, the teenager is also the child of one of Amina's former crewmates – one who died in some horrible gruesome way that Amina feels is ultimately her fault, because the culprit was her husband. Of course there are twists and turns, and the supernatural comes to play an increasingly large part in the storyline, drawing on Arabic mythology familiar to me only from Chakraborty's previous series, the Daevabad trilogy. But whereas that series included a lot more political scheming, this book was much more straightforwardly swashbuckling adventure.

One of the elements of this book that stood out to me was Amina's demonic estranged husband, Raksh... from the moment he came back and the narrative started to emphasise how unimaginably attractive and incredibly good in bed this guy was, I was like, "Oh no, they get back together, don't they." And they don't, really (although they do have sex again, in a scene which is elided over) but it is obvious that this guy is going to reappear in future books, with tension arising from his unreliability as an ally as well as how attracted Amina obviously still is to him. So yeah, that's a thing. I will say that once he came back, he didn't seem nearly as awful as he'd been built up to be in that first half of the book. I thought he was going to be some kind of out-and-out sadistic abuser, but he's not really. He's flighty and deeply selfish, and more to the point he's a demon, so when people "jokingly" offer their souls to him he can't resist. It's a bit unserious but I guess the alternative would've been a reconciliation plotline with a sadistic murderer, and that might be a bit dark for this style of book.

Something else that I think is worth mentioning is just how refreshing it is that this book doesn't pander to Orientalism at all. Lots of people in the West have this idea that the Islamic world is somehow fundamentally different from us: eternally backwards, bound by tradition, with people who are somehow not driven by the same human nature that drives all of us (you know, where people like merriment and sex and having some degree of agency in their own lives). While this novel is very much rooted in its mediaeval Indian Ocean setting, it also tells a story using (mostly) realistic characters instead of Orientalist caricatures. Amina is (in her own words) not a "good Muslim", what with her weakness to booze and men. There is a gay character, and a trans character. While the book doesn't try to glorify that time period either (there are numerous references to slavery, extreme poverty, various manifestations of sexism, interreligious violence, and so forth), it reflects the fact that there have always been people defying traditional norms, and that a life of piracy on the open sea is a pretty liberating, if dangerous, choice for such a person in that time period. Muslims have never been inherently more pious or traditional than anyone else, and in fact most people throughout history have been much less devout than we're typically told they were in school. I mean, the novel is also a swashbuckling fantasy adventure, so it's not very realistic in the sense that most people throughout history didn't have personal dealings with supernatural creatures, but still.

Having said that, the strongest character in this novel by far is Amina herself. Now, there are practical limits on how much the rest of the characters could've been fleshed out, because there are a lot of them and there's also a lot of plot to get through. But certainly the villain is pretty 2D, and you know, it just felt worth noting, even though it seems in keeping with this kind of adventure novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this. I'll definitely be reading the next one.

This was fine. I’ve really appreciated this series’ world-building, but as time has gone on, I’ve less and less enjoyed the directionless, tension-free narratives (although admittedly they are punctuated by bad things that come out of nowhere before they’re swiftly resolved again). I gather that the boring “slice of life” stuff is a large part of why this series is so popular, and I’m not here to tell anyone not to enjoy what they enjoy, but… it doesn’t do it for me.

Anyway, this instalment in the series is set at what is basically an interstellar truck stop, where a few travellers from diverse alien backgrounds are forced to stay a few days after some satellite-related disaster that cuts comms and grounds all transport. There are some misunderstandings resulting from their different backgrounds, and given the low-stakes nature of everything up to that point there was the genuinely shocking almost-death of the adolescent Laru when he was JUST TRYING TO DELIVER SOME CAKE, but (almost) everything gets worked out in the end and everyone is happy. If I’m honest there was one character in particular that I found frustratingly unrelatable (well, her just wanting to spend her few weeks of leave fucking her boyfriend was quite relatable. everything else about her was not) and it still kind of rankles with me that Unrelatable Character was too racist or something to recognise how bad it is that Speaker’s entire species has no inhabitable planet of their own, being totally dependent on spaceships and spacesuits for survival, while her own species keeps colonising new planets like there’s no tomorrow. There was definitely some moral in there about sometimes people have political disagreements with us but we should be friends anyway which seemed a bit meh. I also wasn’t keen on Ouloo’s “I don’t want to care about politics, I just think everyone should be nice” which was framed like some radical truth when actually it’s naive as hell, lol.

Look, probably I could keep going on nitpicking minor things that annoyed me, but the truth is that the book is okay. I managed to read the last two-thirds in one day, mainly because I really wanted to make sure to finish it this year so I didn’t have to adjust my 2025 reading goal again, but I couldn’t have done that if it weren’t at least easy reading. And I genuinely do find the world-building interesting, and once the single most shocking event of the book happened I wanted to keep reading to make sure the affected character would be OK, so obviously I got invested to some extent. Like I said, the book was fine… I just don’t think, having finished this series, I’m going to read much else from this “hopepunk” genre because it’s clearly not for me.

Despite a slow start, this proved to be a fun book. Amina al-Sirafi herself is a great, unconventional, adventure hero. She's a forty-something mediaeval Muslim woman, a single mother, and at the novel's beginning a reformed character: a retired pirate captain who's given up the grog and her past habit of making poor choices in men. But of course she gets sucked back into the game, and basically in the form of a fantastical heist novel, she gets the old crew back together for one last mission... which turns into the first of five last missions because this is the first instalment of a series.

So, in this instalment, Amina is offered a more-than-life-changing amount of money to retrieve the teenage grandchild of a fabulously wealthy woman, who has apparently been kidnapped. As if the money weren't enough, the teenager is also the child of one of Amina's former crewmates – one who died in some horrible gruesome way that Amina feels is ultimately her fault, because the culprit was her husband. Of course there are twists and turns, and the supernatural comes to play an increasingly large part in the storyline, drawing on Arabic mythology familiar to me only from Chakraborty's previous series, the Daevabad trilogy. But whereas that series included a lot more political scheming, this book was much more straightforwardly swashbuckling adventure.

One of the elements of this book that stood out to me was Amina's demonic estranged husband, Raksh... from the moment he came back and the narrative started to emphasise how unimaginably attractive and incredibly good in bed this guy was, I was like, "Oh no, they get back together, don't they." And they don't, really (although they do have sex again, in a scene which is elided over) but it is obvious that this guy is going to reappear in future books, with tension arising from his unreliability as an ally as well as how attracted Amina obviously still is to him. So yeah, that's a thing. I will say that once he came back, he didn't seem nearly as awful as he'd been built up to be in that first half of the book. I thought he was going to be some kind of out-and-out sadistic abuser, but he's not really. He's flighty and deeply selfish, and more to the point he's a demon, so when people "jokingly" offer their souls to him he can't resist. It's a bit unserious but I guess the alternative would've been a reconciliation plotline with a sadistic murderer, and that might be a bit dark for this style of book.

Something else that I think is worth mentioning is just how refreshing it is that this book doesn't pander to Orientalism at all. Lots of people in the West have this idea that the Islamic world is somehow fundamentally different from us: eternally backwards, bound by tradition, with people who are somehow not driven by the same human nature that drives all of us (you know, where people like merriment and sex and having some degree of agency in their own lives). While this novel is very much rooted in its mediaeval Indian Ocean setting, it also tells a story using (mostly) realistic characters instead of Orientalist caricatures. Amina is (in her own words) not a "good Muslim", what with her weakness to booze and men. There is a gay character, and a trans character. While the book doesn't try to glorify that time period either (there are numerous references to slavery, extreme poverty, various manifestations of sexism, interreligious violence, and so forth), it reflects the fact that there have always been people defying traditional norms, and that a life of piracy on the open sea is a pretty liberating, if dangerous, choice for such a person in that time period. Muslims have never been inherently more pious or traditional than anyone else, and in fact most people throughout history have been much less devout than we're typically told they were in school. I mean, the novel is also a swashbuckling fantasy adventure, so it's not very realistic in the sense that most people throughout history didn't have personal dealings with supernatural creatures, but still.

Having said that, the strongest character in this novel by far is Amina herself. Now, there are practical limits on how much the rest of the characters could've been fleshed out, because there are a lot of them and there's also a lot of plot to get through. But certainly the villain is pretty 2D, and you know, it just felt worth noting, even though it seems in keeping with this kind of adventure novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this. I'll definitely be reading the next one.