Heroes of Chaos

I read this back in February and forgot to post a review! Oops!!

This book opens with a famous duel from the era and it was extremely well done. The action, in general, is gripping and exciting, and Wu's prose is a bit more polished here without losing the everyman feel. Liao Hua is a great Protagonist and I enjoyed that in this one, he was a bit older so more capable of making his own decisions. Wu is actually writing two Liao Hua's here- narrator Hua, who is an old man, and young Hua, when the thrust of the story takes place- and I think the differences between the two are well done. The novel has a firm sense of time and place; I always felt like I was in Ancient China, which is very important to me.

I did struggle with some things in this book that made me like it a bit less than book one. I think for the most part, these are me specific and are largely tied into my own feelings about the Three Kingdoms era. The first thing is a major change to Xiahou Dun, most people will not care about this...but it was the only cool thing about Xiahou Dun and it just made me sad it was changed. Secondly, Yu Jin is my favorite person in this time period, and he's portrayed as a malicious drill sergeant here (in the afterword, Wu cited Full Metal Jacket, which I had thought of while reading, so he did nail the feeling he was going for) and I admit to just personally not liking that direction.

The last issue I had was that the central relationship here is between Cao Cao and Liao Hua, and while Cao Cao is portrayed very well here, the relationship he has with Liao Hua never fully makes sense to me and he treats Hua inconsistently. Things like semi-adopting him, then forbidding him from fighting in battle at all, and shortly afterwards, putting him on the front lines.

The pacing for this novel was good, it had to cover a lot of ground and did it very well. There is also a new group of characters that form around Liao Hua as his squad of soldiers, and I liked the banter between these characters.

Excited to continue on!

7.5/10