February Book Review: She Who Became the Sun

As promised, I’m back with a more thorough review of my favorite February read: Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun. Going to try to do this without giving away too many spoilers, but we’ll see how well I succeed. I’ll start with just a copy/paste of the book blurb from Goodreads, because I don’t feel like inventing my own blurb when a) writing blurbs is HARD, yo and b) the blurb already exists. Work smarter, not harder.

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness…

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future: her brother's abandoned greatness.

The blurb does not remotely capture the complexity of this book. Zhu is definitely the main protagonist, and you follow her story throughout, but the other POVs (this is a complex, rotating POV book, pretty much Game of Thrones level in how well each POV character is developed and the overall complexity of the plot/world) are every bit as compelling and integral to the story, such that you don’t feel like you’re just viewing Zhu’s narrative through an outside lens, but rather all the different narratives are intertwined. I LOVED the subtlety of the magic and how well it was incorporated into the otherwise historically accurate setting. In the vaguest non-spoilery way, Zhu sees ghosts; no one else does. The ghosts follow around certain characters, and when the ghosts start to notice Zhu in turn...things get even more complicated. And they were pretty dang complicated to begin with.

On complexity: I love it. I love complexity in my books. I love having to think about what I’m reading and keep all the connections and intricacies of plot, character relationships, backstory, politics, world-building in my head until everything comes together, and I can look back at the end and be satisfied in my superiority. (I am not humble. I front a metal band, ffs, did you expect me to be humble?) At the same time, I was too busy to be able to blow through this book—and it was too long to do that anyway—in a single sitting...so when more than a few days would pass before I could pick it up again, I had to skim back through some of the parts I’d already read to remind myself whose head I was in and what was going on.

There were also a couple major, months-long time skips, moving from one battle to the next, so not a whole lot of “slice of life” scenes in between to see the characters interact with each other in lower stress situations, which I would have enjoyed, particularly seeing the relationship develop between Zhu and Zhu’s eventual spouse (name redacted to avoid spoilers). This book could have easily been three books, if those time skips had not occurred (especially given the multi POV), so I understand why Parker-Chan wrote it that way.

English-speaking readers who aren’t as into history as I am—or who even aren’t as familiar with steppe nomads in general and Mongols in particular, or don’t have a base in Chinese history (which, for the record, I do not; my academic focus was on the Slavic side of the house)—will probably struggle with a lot of the names and concepts in this book. I’m more familiar than your average American with that part of the world, and I still had a hard time with it. Given the state of [gestures broadly at everything going on in my country right now], more people SHOULD be willing to struggle through literature that takes them outside their comfort-zone and introduces them to different parts of the world, different pieces of history, different names and terminology and political concepts than they are accustomed to reading about. So yeah...even if you are hesitant to pick up a book that reflects another culture because you don’t think you’d understand it, DO IT ANYWAY. Heck, do it MORE for precisely that reason.

I’ll end there, because I’m not sure what else to say without giving away major spoilers. But if you’ve already read She Who Became the Sun and want to discuss it with another literature nerd, comment below or shoot me a DM through one of my social media accounts (insta is probably your best bet) and I’d be happy to chat! It truly was a fantastic book, and I can’t recommend it enough, but I know that the same reasons I loved it are the same reasons someone else might hate it...for ’tis dense.