She Makes a Great Samurai

Cold Blood: Yamabuki vs. the Swordmaster by Katherine M. Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a gift, a book I hadn't seen before, and it was a good choice. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Taka Yamabuki is a great main character--confident and capable but still inexperienced, still learning how to read people and not be taken advantage of. She is both admirable and flawed, which is just about ideal.

The story follows her on a journey, making it episodic, with characters entering and exiting in the way of classic novels, but there is also an arc to the story, a concrete goal for her with intrigue surrounding it, that makes it work for modern expectations. The author also does a good job of educating the western reader, explaining cultural norms that would otherwise be opaque (at least in my case). I enjoyed everything about it, including the cover and end matter, except for it coming to an end too quickly!

I'm excited about grabbing the sequels. I don't think I'll wait for my next birthday to be surprised with volume 2.

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Where the Main Character Is Terrifying. But Good.

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book. I planned to like it more, but it was still good, and most people who think this sounds like a good book are likely to find out they're right.

As a reader, I liked the setting and themes and the fact that it was written from an "own voices" perspectives. That lends the action some weight, and the real events in our timeline are echoed in this secondary world is very effective. It still reads like fantasy, but it has the power of real life behind it.

The characters are interesting and sympathetic, most of the time, but I didn't love the meandering plot they lived through. I thought at first it was a sort of Harry Potter outsider-at-school story: many fellow students are rounded out, the setting is fully developed, conflicts are established, and we are set up for continued action at the school. But that was just the first third or so. When we jumped into the next part of the story, it felt like the previous section was unnecessary (making the early sections at home even less relevant), and almost everything that happened there was redundant in the end. The student rivalries that gave the first part of the book its energy become swallowed up by the greater events going on outside.

Maybe that was a thematic choice. I dunno. Showing how school isn't quite real life yet... Maybe.

The last half is the most entertaining, and especially the last chapters. I read that with the most pleasure. I have seen many glowing reviews of the next book, so I hope to find the action I enjoyed most in book 1 rolls right into book 2.

Outside of entertainment, the book is important because of its handling of themes regarding race, colonialism, empire, prejudice, and all the ills attendant on them. Rin is underestimated because she's a dark-skinned peasant from the south; the light-skinned children of government officials are privileged and condescending; natives of Speer are considered dangerous and less human; and the people of Nikara and the people of Mugen despise each other equally, each seeing the other as beneath contempt.

Nothing is tidy here; no heroes, really; just problematic characters trying to figure out what it means to human.

Recommended.

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