The Complete Poppy War Trilogy Boxed Set: The Poppy War / The Dragon Republic / The Burning God

This story was so well written. It spans about 4-6 years and is truly an epic fantasy. The author does a great job of using the fantastical elements to cause, either directly or indirectly, the historically inspired events. To some degree, I should have seen elements of this book coming, but I think I was caught up in feeling the wartime elements to foresee any of the tragedy, which to achieve that level of immersion as an author just shows how good R.F. Kuang is.

This is also one of the few times I have used the map in a book just to understand the basic geography. Since a lot of this story is military based, it makes sense to gain an understanding of why certain strategies work and others don't. I have no metric for what a good military strategy is, but it feels like Kuang really put a lot of effort into thinking this through.

We see the main character Rin grow up from being 14 to 19/20 by the end of the book. So much has happened to her and she is just trying to make sense of it all. I feel like she is a morally grey character by the end of the book, but I feel like she has a chance of going either way. She is peak "burnt out gifted child"; she starts off the book being insanely smart and conniving and able to make her way into Sinegard, but eventually she realizes that even being smart isn't enough. The way she craves praise truly breaks my heart because I know that'll be her demise.

I also love the way the author shows Rin's fear of summoning the Gods. She actually spends a majority of the book being bad at everything and I LOVED that. It is so rare we get an actual training arc for a main character and not just them overnight being amazing at what they do. Kuang also depicts the morality of summoning Gods against mankind very well. I like that basically until the end you could not tell where Rin stood on the matter, further enhancing how smart Rin is. The fact that she doesn't easily get swept up in others opinions is very refreshing to see after reading other books.

The ensemble characters that we meet through the book (and boy do we meet many) are written very realistically. We get to see them shaped by wartime and no character that we meet is not shaken by the end.

Overall 5 star book because it made me feel things and realize that the world is several shades of grey. For every part of me that is excited to read the next two books, there is double the part of me that is scared to see how much more these characters will be broken.

The genocide in this was so hard to read. The author did such a good job of showing it. It was also one of the first books I read with genocide spelled out and the character experiencing it (not once but twice). It is so sad to see that this is what it takes for people to come to action but even then they are willing to kill millions before they take a stand. I can't say I fully agree with Rin's actions at the end, she ended the war but I feel like she became just as bad as the Federation with the way she chose to end it.

Sehr sehr brutal! Mega spannend, aber bin sehr sauer übers Ende 😂😂