A Song to Drown Rivers: Deluxe Edition

Beautiful story. Sad.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the arc!

Read this a few months back. There were a lot of things in the novel that worked for me. The writing did very well imitating the feeling of learning ancestral folklore - it was lyrical but not complicated, and added the right kind of both tenderness and intensity to heartbreaking and pivotal scenes. The mythological atmosphere of the novel was complimented by Liang's writing and by how she described not only the settings in her story but also the characters and events. All of the characters in the story were interesting and well-rounded and I found myself falling for Xishi just like the men around her. I was never once bored while reading this novel.

What I think did not work so well was the romance. While I could certainly feel the longing between Xishi and Fanli, it felt far too rushed to be anything other than surface level. After only a week or so spent in training to initiate their plan to take back their kingdom, the two main characters seem to already be deeply drawn to each other and Xishi is constantly falling deeper for Fanli. Not only does the short time span of their love make the romance seem trivial, but so too does the fact that the novel does not give very much detail as to what exactly happens during training - there are instead time skips to get the main plot of the novel started. This is an issue because the majority of the time that Xishi and Fanli spend together is during training and once it is complete, they spend years apart and only see each other sparingly. It feels as if there is no foundation to their love for readers to see besides initial attraction and curiosity and made me wonder why they still felt obligations towards each other years later.

I was also not a big fan of the end of the novel and I am still trying to wrap my head around what Liang meant to teach readers. Spoiler alert! The novel does a good job of getting across the point that war is not black and white, that there is good and evil on both sides and perspective changes everything. What I do not understand is why, at the end, Liang chose to romanticize and soften the enemy Wu king, Fuchai, and even went so far as to have Xishi feel pity for him yet at the same time hardened and villainized the Yue king. If the point Liang wanted to convey was that all rulers are corrupt, selfish, and not to be trusted, why would she humanize the Wu king and show his emotional side? It felt as if we are supposed to forgive all the evil he has done simply because he is a boy in love who is going to die, yet we are supposed to hate the Yue king because he killed someone who he thought would be a threat and wanted to protect his kingdom. Yes, everyone contains good and evil inside of them but this ending felt heavily biased to make Xishi forgive Fuchai and all the evil acts he did. To me, this is a mishandling of the themes of war and colonialism. If anyone can help me better understand Liang's motivation for romanticizing the Wu king's death and for having the Yue king kill Xishi I would greatly appreciate it!

As a side note, was anyone else confused by Xishi's heart defect? I kept waiting for it to be relevant to the plot or to her character but besides being mentioned once or twice in the beginning it was virtually irrelevant.

A Song to Drown Rivers is certainly a beautiful and emotional novel despite the fact that there are weaker elements in it. However, once I finished the story I was still thinking about it a week later and because of that, I feel that most readers will enjoy it.