It’s fine! Nice light bombastically melodramatic reading, though with a lot of content warnings (I do like that they’re at the front of the book). I’m a sucker for mecha, especially weird, slightly more organic mecha, and this generally scratched that itch. The prose style doesn’t quite work for me and I don’t… think that it’s especially well written? But I’m giving it 3 cos I did enjoy it and was happy to suspend judgement of quality in order to have a nice time. The main character manages imo to be a Tough Female Character Who Hates Emotion and also very easy to root for, and it has some nice juicy twists of the sort that are fun to encounter in a YA novel.

Spoilers now:

There seemed to be a lot of potential for a genuinely complicated and difficult political situation, where the main character wrangled with complicity and compromise a little more, without a big heroic/villainous moment at the end where she gets to keep all of her power through essentially the ‘I am the House’ ending option in Fallout New Vegas. It was a fun power fantasy ending, but it felt like a way to avoid wrangling with more complex politics. But themes of complicity are not neglected, it seems to be deliberately focusing more on personal relationships and identity, and after all this kind of thing might come in more in the sequel that the book is very much aiming toward. Also all else unchanged it would have been a fairly miserable book without a moment where the beaten-down protag finds a way to somehow break out of the system she hates.

Additionally it must be said that the scenes of intimacy before they fade to black are just not great. There’s no real awful bits but, at least for me (which is a big disclaimer), I wasn’t even entirely sure what they were trying to tap into with the sensory description.

I would also have liked to see a little more of the time between Zetian meeting Shimin and hating him, and her being angry at him in a I’m-mad-I-have-feelings-for-you way. We get snippets of how his violence reminds her of her father and grandfather and makes her want to flinch and make herself small, and she confronts him about the deaths of women that he’s complicit in, but when she gets closer to him it didn’t come off to me as a serious and dramatic change in opinion, only as her feeling the same attraction and empathy for him since almost their first meeting. Which is allowed! It just feels like it dilutes the initial situation of, from her perspective, very justified fear and anger. I would have liked to see them trust each other less quickly and their relationship as something they each had to put more emotional work into. But, yknow, I kind of don’t want more time spent on the love triangle, so this works.

A nice way to spend a few tired hours :)