hardcover, 384 pages
English language
Published Sept. 20, 2021 by Penguin Teen.
Science fiction and East Asian myth combine in this dazzling retelling of the rise of Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history
The boys of Huaxia dream of the celebrity status that comes with piloting Chrysalises - giant transforming robots that battle the aliens beyond the Great Wall. Their female co-pilots are expected to serve as concubines and sacrifice their lives.
When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, her plan is to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. But on miraculously emerging from the cockpit unscathed after her first battle, the Iron Widow sets her sights on bigger things. The time has come to take on the entire patriarchal military system.
„Iron Widow“ ist ein lauter, wütender Aufschrei gegen Unterdrückung und missbräuchliche Systeme, die Teile der Bevölkerung als bequeme Ressource verheizen, ohne sie als Menschen zu sehen. Gewürzt wird das ganze mit queeren Charakteren und bombastischen Kämpfen zwischen Mechas und Aliens in einer kreativen Reimagination Chinas.
I like Xiran Jay Zhao. They're a great content creator and their Twitter is something to behold. So it was only a matter of time until I got to Iron Widow. That time was this week when I had a 5 hour bus journey in front of me and needed something to entertain me.
It was certainly a quick read for my standards. But then, I always seem to eat through YA literature as opposed to everything else I read, even if I go out of it with a sense of dissatisfaction. Which is not really something I felt here, even though the book has left me wanting in the worst possible way. The characters are... fine. Wu Zetian is the main character and thus the most fleshed out. The two love interests (it's an actual love triangle!) are somewhat shallow and everyone else is either window dressing or someone …
I like Xiran Jay Zhao. They're a great content creator and their Twitter is something to behold. So it was only a matter of time until I got to Iron Widow. That time was this week when I had a 5 hour bus journey in front of me and needed something to entertain me.
It was certainly a quick read for my standards. But then, I always seem to eat through YA literature as opposed to everything else I read, even if I go out of it with a sense of dissatisfaction. Which is not really something I felt here, even though the book has left me wanting in the worst possible way. The characters are... fine. Wu Zetian is the main character and thus the most fleshed out. The two love interests (it's an actual love triangle!) are somewhat shallow and everyone else is either window dressing or someone that violence is enacted upon in some way. Seriously, if you like violence and revenge fantasies, this will be right up your alley. Zetian leaves a trail of destruction in her wake that is bar anything I've read in recent times.
That comes at the cost of narrative depth though. There's so many elements to this scifi-fantasy version of medieval-modern China that are essential to the story - most importantly the concept of qi, which the pilots of the giant animechs people use to fight - that obviously have a lot of thought behind them but are explained so badly that, even after reading the book, I still have no idea what any of them are supposed to do. There's so many instances of "so I combined my Metal qi with his Wood qi" or whatever and I just kind of glossed over it as technobabble. Which is really disappointing because, again, there seems to be an actual system to this whole thing?
But none of that is explained in a satisfactory way because we need to get to the next fight, battle, torture, or romance scene as quick as possible lest the book lose the interest of its readers. It seems to have worked, as evidenced by the speed I read the book with. But it really didn't give me any opportunity to just let the whole thing sink in. There is no space to breathe between the pages which would've been necessary considering the onslaught of stuff that is happening. It also doesn't provide enough space to explore any of the character's motivations. Zetian is driven by revenge against a patriarchal society, that much is established. But she goes from "I hate my family" to "The. World. Must. Burn." so quick, it gave me whiplash.
I'd still say it's a decent read. And I'll probably read the second installment, as this seems to aim to be a series. But it neither left me hungry for more, really. Nor did it satisfy in a narrative sense.
Content warning Spoilers beneath a break at the bottom!
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 :)
When her sister dies in the war efforts, Xetian decides to take her revenge on the pilot who killed her.
This story punched me in the gut with al the wrongs in the world (the author's fictional world and by extension our own) but it also wrapped me up in the warm fuzzies with how wonderful people can be. And then it punched me again.
Huh. This book is an abusive partner. Still, I'm not going to break up with it.
An unapologetic sci-fi tale that pulls no punches and will leave readers fired up and ready to overthrow the patriarchy.
