A review by charlotekerstenauthor
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang
“There are never any new stories, just old ones told again and again as this universe moves through its cycles of civilization and crumbles into despair.”
What I Thought
I totally and absolutely get why this series is as hyped as it is, but I’ll also admit that my feelings about it have been complex from the start. Kuang is immensely talented and these books are some of the most compulsively-readable and gripping I’ve ever encountered. At the same time, some aspects have never quite gelled for me. That general opinion remains the same for the final book, though I do think that this is by far the best of the series.
Part of that has to do with how my attitude has changed towards Rin. I was deeply frustrated with her in the second book and in my review I wrote about that like it was a failing on the part of the author. I’m not sure that’s fair, though, now that I’ve seen Rin’s arc in full. She does remain incredibly frustrating to read about but I feel like her characterization is at its best in this book and I really got what Kuang was going for this time. We see her descent into paranoia, her inability to see a world beyond destruction and war and another enemy to defeat. Her way of seeing the world is so simplistic – vanquish your enemy and everything will be fine. My favorite part of the book is when she starts to realize that that isn’t the case and falls apart at an even more rapid pace. Kuang makes it clear that there will always be another enemy and in solving her problems the way she does she is only causing more problems to arise in the form of chaos and destruction on a massive scale. Interestingly, she also can’t understand why people don’t adore her and even though she’s witnessed unimaginable civilian suffering for years now she still feels entitled to their worship after everything she’s put them through. Finally, those who disliked her passivity in the previous books will be glad to see how much more active she is in The Burning God.
I will say that a few things still left me a little unsatisfied with Rin’s characterization. At one point she says that she has “come to terms” with her genocide of the Mugenese and when I read that I was like…girl, what? If the point of this is to show how entirely delusional Rin is then I’d say job well done – I’m just not sure if that is the case or not. I also feel like her arc with addiction and substance abuse is pretty poorly-realized all the way through as I never truly felt that she was a well-depicted addict in the way I’ve felt with other books like Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg or the Fitz books by Robin Hobb.
I also complained a lot about the Nezha stuff in the previous book, and I’m still not really on board with whatever ill-fated irrevocable connection Kuang tried to write for him and Rin. It just never really landed for me – I never cared about it and I pretty much have no interest in reading The Drowned Faith. In this book there’s a scene where Rin, Kitay and Nezha all drink wine together on the battlefield after fighting against each other and I just…got what she was going for, but the relationships between the three never quite felt resonant.
There are a few story beats that really got old in this book - by the end I was tired of kidnappings and Rin losing her powers over and over again. I also question why the entire arc with the Trifecta was necessary. It felt like a subplot with so much wasted potential and it ended incredibly abruptly with their destruction. Another bizarre thing is that Rin gets literally entombed in a tortuous mind prison for what feels like an eternity to her and then we just more or less breeze past this plot point onto bigger and better things.
The other thing I’ve talked about consistently in these reviews is the treatment of violence against women, and I think it’s worth discussing here too. Nearly every female character except for Rin has a background that features rape and sex slavery, and while I 100% get that this is a horrific reality of war I still don’t feel like Kuang ever uses this to say anything particularly complex about trauma or the relationship between gender, power and violence in times of war. The other thing is that literally every single one of these women dies, with Daji facing additional abuse and degradation by Riga’s hands before she is killed.
As I’ve mentioned, I of course understand that this is a Brutal War Story so lots of characters die, but I think the additional context of sexually assaulted characters often being treated as disposable by their creators is important here, as well as the book's overall dearth of complex female characters beyond Rin. And as I've mentioned in a previous review I've had a bad streak of reading books where rape survivors die tragically lately. The one scene I really love is when Venka screams at a girl she’s just rescued from a brothel in Tikany because she can’t stand to see her weakness in the face of the horror that they’ve both experienced. It’s a fascinating scene and I think I’d have been a lot happier if there had just been a few more scenes or conversations like this.
The themes of colonialism are present in this book too, and there are some really interesting moments about the Hesperians and their technology. It was deeply uncomfortable for me to read about Rin’s astonishment at their transformation of a local city with all kinds of technology that is unimaginable to her. Equally uncomfortable to me was Kitay’s secret fear that the Hesperians are in fact innately superior just like they say, and Nezha’s insistence on the inevitability of bending the knee and getting outside aid in order to help the people of Nikara. It’s telling that the Hesperians are so willing to sweep in with their beneficence to help with the devastation caused by a maelstrom of conflict that they helped orchestrate in the first place. It’s a great depiction, overall, of the imperialist’s obsession with order and progress, control and advancement, and I think one of the most interesting points made here is that it is ultimately impossible to try to earn their colonizer’s respect because they will never give their respect to a people that they see as innately inferior and subhuman.
A few final stray observations – I don’t know how Kuang knows so much about military strategy or how to make it not only readable but incredibly interesting to someone who generally does not care about that kind of stuff at all, but it’s pretty amazing. The book ends like a punch to the gut and I don’t think any other ending would have been nearly as fitting or impactful.
What I Thought
I totally and absolutely get why this series is as hyped as it is, but I’ll also admit that my feelings about it have been complex from the start. Kuang is immensely talented and these books are some of the most compulsively-readable and gripping I’ve ever encountered. At the same time, some aspects have never quite gelled for me. That general opinion remains the same for the final book, though I do think that this is by far the best of the series.
Part of that has to do with how my attitude has changed towards Rin. I was deeply frustrated with her in the second book and in my review I wrote about that like it was a failing on the part of the author. I’m not sure that’s fair, though, now that I’ve seen Rin’s arc in full. She does remain incredibly frustrating to read about but I feel like her characterization is at its best in this book and I really got what Kuang was going for this time. We see her descent into paranoia, her inability to see a world beyond destruction and war and another enemy to defeat. Her way of seeing the world is so simplistic – vanquish your enemy and everything will be fine. My favorite part of the book is when she starts to realize that that isn’t the case and falls apart at an even more rapid pace. Kuang makes it clear that there will always be another enemy and in solving her problems the way she does she is only causing more problems to arise in the form of chaos and destruction on a massive scale. Interestingly, she also can’t understand why people don’t adore her and even though she’s witnessed unimaginable civilian suffering for years now she still feels entitled to their worship after everything she’s put them through. Finally, those who disliked her passivity in the previous books will be glad to see how much more active she is in The Burning God.
I will say that a few things still left me a little unsatisfied with Rin’s characterization. At one point she says that she has “come to terms” with her genocide of the Mugenese and when I read that I was like…girl, what? If the point of this is to show how entirely delusional Rin is then I’d say job well done – I’m just not sure if that is the case or not. I also feel like her arc with addiction and substance abuse is pretty poorly-realized all the way through as I never truly felt that she was a well-depicted addict in the way I’ve felt with other books like Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg or the Fitz books by Robin Hobb.
I also complained a lot about the Nezha stuff in the previous book, and I’m still not really on board with whatever ill-fated irrevocable connection Kuang tried to write for him and Rin. It just never really landed for me – I never cared about it and I pretty much have no interest in reading The Drowned Faith. In this book there’s a scene where Rin, Kitay and Nezha all drink wine together on the battlefield after fighting against each other and I just…got what she was going for, but the relationships between the three never quite felt resonant.
There are a few story beats that really got old in this book - by the end I was tired of kidnappings and Rin losing her powers over and over again. I also question why the entire arc with the Trifecta was necessary. It felt like a subplot with so much wasted potential and it ended incredibly abruptly with their destruction. Another bizarre thing is that Rin gets literally entombed in a tortuous mind prison for what feels like an eternity to her and then we just more or less breeze past this plot point onto bigger and better things.
The other thing I’ve talked about consistently in these reviews is the treatment of violence against women, and I think it’s worth discussing here too. Nearly every female character except for Rin has a background that features rape and sex slavery, and while I 100% get that this is a horrific reality of war I still don’t feel like Kuang ever uses this to say anything particularly complex about trauma or the relationship between gender, power and violence in times of war. The other thing is that literally every single one of these women dies, with Daji facing additional abuse and degradation by Riga’s hands before she is killed.
As I’ve mentioned, I of course understand that this is a Brutal War Story so lots of characters die, but I think the additional context of sexually assaulted characters often being treated as disposable by their creators is important here, as well as the book's overall dearth of complex female characters beyond Rin. And as I've mentioned in a previous review I've had a bad streak of reading books where rape survivors die tragically lately. The one scene I really love is when Venka screams at a girl she’s just rescued from a brothel in Tikany because she can’t stand to see her weakness in the face of the horror that they’ve both experienced. It’s a fascinating scene and I think I’d have been a lot happier if there had just been a few more scenes or conversations like this.
The themes of colonialism are present in this book too, and there are some really interesting moments about the Hesperians and their technology. It was deeply uncomfortable for me to read about Rin’s astonishment at their transformation of a local city with all kinds of technology that is unimaginable to her. Equally uncomfortable to me was Kitay’s secret fear that the Hesperians are in fact innately superior just like they say, and Nezha’s insistence on the inevitability of bending the knee and getting outside aid in order to help the people of Nikara. It’s telling that the Hesperians are so willing to sweep in with their beneficence to help with the devastation caused by a maelstrom of conflict that they helped orchestrate in the first place. It’s a great depiction, overall, of the imperialist’s obsession with order and progress, control and advancement, and I think one of the most interesting points made here is that it is ultimately impossible to try to earn their colonizer’s respect because they will never give their respect to a people that they see as innately inferior and subhuman.
A few final stray observations – I don’t know how Kuang knows so much about military strategy or how to make it not only readable but incredibly interesting to someone who generally does not care about that kind of stuff at all, but it’s pretty amazing. The book ends like a punch to the gut and I don’t think any other ending would have been nearly as fitting or impactful.