女将军和长公主 | Female General and Eldest Princess

This is one longass book.... I don't even know where to start.

First of all , this is published online and fan translated. The writing (or translation) on a technical level, is not very good. It's extremely stilted a lot of phrasings are odd. And as someone not familiar with this genre a lot of terms were puzzling and remained unexplained within the story. Before starting the book you really should be awareof this, it didn't really impact my enjoyment and I got over it quickly.

The format also affects the pacing, it has short chapters and was published daily. On one hand I think this sort of platform and format offered the author the freedom to go where she wanted with the story. It's very slow paced and I think an editor would cut down a lot of it and it would lose a lot of it's charm (this could ultimately be for the better but I think letting the author have full control has it's own benefits) not to mention this sort of story isn't likely to be published in the first place. The short chapters make the long overall story easier to digest. It also has very short paragraphs, perhaps this is normal in chinese but it stood out to me as a bit odd. But again this just made the read feel quicker.

For the first half of the story I thought id be giving it 5 stars despite the technical issues which I was willing to look over because it's not traditionally published or translated and it didn't make me enjoy it any less. A bit after the halfway point when all the set up was supposed to start to pay off....it just didn't. Things were glossed over and resolved in ways in convenient ways. Ultimately I felt very unsatisfied with almost all conflicts resolution. For example my biggest problem was

Wanyue is mad at Li Xian for years for being a murderous manipulative weirdo but when they "talk it out" Li Xian just goes, well, i don't regret what I did, and I'd do it again, but also I am out of the situation that I need to do that sort of thing now. and Wanyue is satisfied with that..? Like I'm sorry this is the lamest resolution possible. Maybe something was lost in translation there but even so this conversation made no sense to me and was extremely unsatisfying

Some people think the ending was rushed, honestly by that point I had lost most of my investment, and didn't care because the stuff I did care about got resolved in such unsatisfying ways. I read most of the extras and I actually really enjoyed a side character who gets more development there, author explained why she put that in extras but I think that could have been fit into the main story and made it stronger for it. As is most side characters are extremely flat and you're only there for the main couple. Who I do like, a lot. I wouldn't have read this long a book if I didn't. But that's also why I was annoyed with the non-resolutions of their clashing world views.

I've been very negative but I did enjoy most of the book a lot, the ending did “ruin” it a bit but it's still the first novel of an indie author and I will definitely check out other things by her but this one I can't in good conscience give more than 3 stars, still would recommend it , just know what you're getting into.