Reviews with content warning for Rape - Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea

Depsite being one of the most successful pirates in all of history, a lot of people don't know about Shek Yeung. She's a badass female pirate from Canton (now called Guangzhou) who commanded fleets of pirates. I wish there were more books written about her or this period in time.

While there are some battle scenes, this book is not a swashbuckling adventure. Rather it's foucsed on Shek Yueng's journey to keep her power, struggles with traditional feminie roles, and choices we make to survive. Interestingly, I enjoyed the slower moments of the book as Shek Yueng grappled with her place in the world. And I loved the exploration of non-traditional motherhood.

The author tries to draw parallels between goddess Ma Zou and Shek Yueng with mixed results. When it worked it was powerful payoff. When it didn't work it was clunky and felt like filler material. You can tell the author injected some modern day sensibilities into 1800's China, making character's actions feel out of sync at times. I can't fault this book too much for it as this is the trend with female POV retellings.

Content Warnings

ad1t1s's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Content Warnings

lochnessvhs's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

If you want to read about the intracacies of Chinese pirate politics and war strategy, this is the novel for you!

Content Warnings

culpeppper's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

The plot of this story is pretty straightforward and simple on the surface: a pirate captain dies, the world is changing due to aggressive colonial actions, and a tired woman is just trying to survive all the shit that happens between it all. There's a lot going on in the in between. Shek Yeung is a complex character, someone who spent most of her younger life isolated, brutalized, and/or controlled by abusers but soon has a chance at a kind of freedom when her first husband dies in the beginning of the book.

Her agency, or lack therof, sticks out to me amongst all the other topics Chang-Eppig covers in the story. Shek Yeung's whole life is controlled by others, their specters hanging over her and shadowing almost every choice she makes. Her husbands, living and dead, give reasoning for her choices she makes. Notably when she makes choices that harm others, she may recall with a pride and maybe a little guilt that she choices she made would have been the same choices her dead husband would have made. It cheapens her actions; just once, I wanted her to say she wasn't making a choice regarding the fleet without checking it against what He would have done.

Her relationship with Yan-Yan feels particularly imbalanced throughout the narrative in a way that isn't really explored.

This is solidified at the end when Shek Yeung leaves a now implied to be disabled Yan-Yan to live a life she has expressed she didn't want previous to her doing this. Though she maybe feels conflicted about it, there's no real interrogation of what Shek Yeung (and Dawa but she's hardly a character) is actually doing by choosing this life of motherhood over employment for Yan-Yan, who has little to say after getting injured for the sake of Shek Yeung's child until she is forced into her new life. Kinda weird.

There are a lot of things that I'm just taking as fictionalized elements of historical reality (as I have very little knowledge on this particular part of time and space) but the lack of meaningful interrogation on what it means for Shek Yeung to have this power, and the continued lack of agency, means a lot of the other elements fall a little short of what I think Chang-Eppig was going for.

On the surface, if you don't look too deep, it's a fine book. Pacing can be weird, there's time jumps back and forth, there's some interesting mythical interludes that add a little depth to the world, side characters are all kinda one dimensional, the lines of leading questions made me roll my eyes, and I don't think it dug as deep as it thought it did— but overall, I eventually got invested and liked the attempts at serious conversations, even if I would have liked it do have gone a little deeper.

Content Warnings

Graphic: Confinement, Death, Misogyny, Slavery, Terminal illness, Torture, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Trafficking, Kidnapping, Grief, Death of parent, Pregnancy, Colonisation, War, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, and Gaslighting

Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Islamophobia, Cannibalism, and Abortion

Takes place just prior to the start of the Opium Wars, at the end of the height of piracy. All the topics are what are to be expected, more or less, from reading the inside flap and having a general understanding of how brutal we can be as a species. There are multiple battle scenes, which include blood, injuries, and death. Multiple accounts of sexual violence, including rape, not overly graphic but frequent. Colonization hangs heavy on the narrative. Sexual slavery:

The main character is captured by pirates as a teenager, raped, and eventually sold to a Madam who runs some "flower boats" (floating brothel.) During this time, the character is a teenager, aging to young adult. The physical, verbal, sexual, and emotional abuse is mostly alluded to rather than described explicitly, in most cases. She is eventually "freed" from this slavery by marrying her first husband, the older pirate captain, who is taken in by her brains and beauty. While consensual and happening when Shek Yeung is a young adult, there is still a sense of ownership and power imbalance. The main male lead was taken as an adolescent and implied to have had relationships with much older pirate captains.

Familial Death, and Illness:

Father and brother dead or presumed dead because pirates, mother died from some illness *I think* when main character was young. Main character's best friend is sick during the beginning of the story and dies from some illness off-page.

Imprisonment:

Captives are taken multiple times through the book. The main characters are all captives in one way or another, forced mostly by circumstance and hard choices, and there are multiple times where that slavery/imprisonment is described or recounted. There are multiple captives taken, and sometimes tortured, in the story with a main or side character's order or action. Torture not graphic but frequently mentioned, or used subtly.

Pregnacy warnings: Main character spends multiple scenes and a period of time pregnant in the story.

There are two different traumatic birth scenes. One is at the end of her high risk pregnancy.

jayisreading's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous reflective medium-paced

3.25

I didn’t find this novel particularly memorable, but I didn’t think it was a mediocre read either. Looking into the life of one of the most well-known female pirates in history, Shek Yeung (which I discovered was a name variant of Ching Shih), Chang-Eppig delivers a somewhat tepid story that lacked a lot of excitement a reader might expect from a novel about pirates. It wasn’t to say that the novel was completely devoid of action, but I found that it didn’t meet my expectations for something especially adventurous, as the blurb led me on to believe. I did find it interesting that Chang-Eppig had Shek Yeung contend with the struggles and wonders of womanhood and femininity, especially how she gestured toward the heavy influences of Confucianism in shaping the pirate’s understanding of her unique position. However, I think Chang-Eppig’s desire to draw out these ideas in detail affected the overall plot and pacing.

I think there’s something in this novel that will appeal to some readers, but it didn’t quite do enough for me.

Content Warnings

lindsayreads21's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This book started out super strong. I was drawn into Shek Yeung’s story immediately. Unfortunately, the momentum dragged a bit after those first few chapters. This is a book about a “legendary Chinese pirate queen” so I expected it to be full of adventure and excitement. Instead, it was a lot of time in the head of an almost reluctant pirate queen. Stolen from her family and forced to sell her body only to be “chosen” by the leader of a pirate fleet - yeah, I’d be pretty reluctant too. This book was really interesting and often had me writing notes in the margin. Shek Yeung is not the kind of queen or mother that you might expect, but she is the kind of queen and mother that the world made her.

Content Warnings

mari_library's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous informative reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This is was not what I was expecting. But it was still enjoyable and a great read. It had the perfect blend of information and intrigue. While I wasn't itching to pick the book back up every time I put it down, I still felt compelled to read it and never felt a dull moment. It takes a bit of time to get into it but it is worth it.

I don't think this book was trying to be revolutionary, it said what it was going to do and it did it flawlessly. I loved the conversations on womanhood, girlhood, and motherhood with the cultural implications. Coming from the west, the difference and similarities in the conversation was interesting to hear. I loved the commentary on the complex relationship women have with the culture of Imperial China at that time, and how a woman who breaks away from it also has a complex relationship with themselves regarding the way they grew up. I do wish some more aspects were delve in deeper, but since this was not a plot-focused book and instead character-focused, everything that happened felt organic to the character we were following. To be frank, I could probably have read 100 more pages of it and not have gotten tired. Shek Yeung is such an interesting characters and up there as one of my favorites.

Content Warnings

More...