A review by autistic_dragon
Girls of Storm and Shadow by Natasha Ngan

dark fast-paced
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

CONTENT WARNING: Extreme violence, rape and subsequent trauma, sexual slavery, self-harm, suicide, alcoholism
This is one of my most grudging five-star reviews ever.
“Why,” you may ask, “…is that? You shouldn’t feel guilted into giving a book more stars than you think it deserves.”
Well, the thing is, the childish—not as in petulant, but rather the optimistic and idealistic—part of me wants the last third of this book to be very different from what it is, but the mature person I am now cannot help but marvel at the ways Ngan tugs at the reader’s heartstrings, and how the numerous twists and turns into moral ambiguity weave so deftly together.Looking back at my 
November 2018 review of the first book in the series, I was being overly simplistic as to the future course of the series. While the series remains interesting East Asian-inspired high fantasy with enough anthropomorphic animals to mistake this for a piece of furry fandom fiction, and also even more same-sex romances than the first book, to the point that I’m pretty sure there’s more same-sex sexual tension than opposite-sex, this is very much also a war story. Not one of epic pitched battles for control of the kingdom, but rather the dark political underbelly of war that embodies the (in)famous Carl von Clausewitz quote, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In this way it is reminiscent of the final* installment of The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay, and judging from my skimming of the other reviews, the general consensus as to that book may apply to you as well. This book contains multiple reader gut-punches of increasing intensity, and I was not kidding around when I included violence in the content warning up there. This book is so violent it’s a miracle the publishers were able to market it as YA.

This book takes Book 1’s already dark premise and makes it even darker, and in such an artful way that I can’t help admiring the grim tableau that Natasha Ngan has made for us. Therefore, five stars.
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