The Iron Widow Book
The Iron Widow was recommended to me by some NYT or other review site, and I thought the premise was quite interesting. Take a sci fi setting, add a bit of Pacific Rim pilots (you need 2 to pilot the robots), add some transformation/evolving (like evangelion) of the robots, and then use all the chinese standard fantasy tropes you can think of, mash it together on high, and then add the empress Wu Zetian and see what you get.
The result is a rather engaging page turner that reminds me a lot of the writing style of R.F Kuang’s first few novels. The author (its a they/them, so I’ll use author here) is of the “economy of words” strain and everything is done in a hurry. The plot moves at a million miles per hour and there are no wasted chapters. This is probably 50% the work of a copy editor trying to trim words here, but the effects are the same. It gives the author the sense that everything is moving fast, quickly and you gotta get to the next plot point.
Speaking of plot points, there’s a few major ones here that I won’t spoil, but suffice to say that if you grew up with Chinese culture and pop literature, you’ll be dazed by how much of it is thrown out here. You have the main character, herself named after the only female empress in chinese history, you have references to Sun WuKong of Travel to the West fame, you have the 4 primary elemental beasts (white tiger, vermillion bird/phoenix, black turtle, and the green/azure dragon), you have feet binding as a major plot point….and the railings of the unfairness of why females are subjugated to males in Chinese society.
Its all rather heady and you go like, “woah” the first time it happens. Initially I thought it was a big gauche, since it’d be like “robin hood meets king arthur and they combine to drive out enemies of…britian” as a fan fic, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought why not. The historical fiction person in me can see it working, but only when done well.
And the book IS done well, its done well in that the giant robots beating alien creature invaders never gets old. The action is fast, furious, very confusing, but the author keeps it all in check. the out of combat sequences are also compelling mostly because the world building is decent enough.
this IS a young adult novel, so I am also keeping that in mind. You don’t read this book for the beauty of the prose, and while there are some young adult novels like the Last unicorn that provides a lot of good story beats and beautiful prose, that’s a rather high bar to achieve.
All in all, this is a good read, well worth the 3 or 4 hours you’ll spend on it and you’ll be looking forward to the next one. Think of it as the author’s first outing, and you can hope it only goes up from here!
Highly recomended.