I just finished reading The Dragon Republic, by RF Kuang.
This is the second book in Kuang’s Poppy War series, and you definitely shouldn’t read this review if you don’t want spoilers for the first book. You should, instead, go read the first book.
Quick synopsis of The Dragon Republic: shaman-soldier Rin, after bringing her enemies to horrifying ruin in the last book, is working with her band of steadily-growing-more-insane magic supersoldiers to assassinate the people who betrayed them to the Federation. That doesn’t work out, and instead she’s recruited to aid one warlord’s grand dream of an Empire unified into a Republic. Magic, steel, gunpowder, and very direct colonial allegories are the order of the day.
Let’s start with those allegories, shall we? The different nations in the Poppy War series are clear analogues to real-life nations, and their history is a story that has been told many times before. The Nikara Empire is China, the Federation of Mugen is Japan, and the blue-eyed, pale-skinned army from across the sea is a conglomeration of various European meddlers and colonizers.
Fortunately, The Dragon Republic doesn’t use these analogues in a lazy way. Instead, they’re used to add weight to the story, giving the reader more context into the interplay of these political forces than the main character, with her limited worldview, would have. When a Grey Company missionary starts talking about racial science and social development, the unease that the reader feels is based entirely on knowledge of the atrocities that these ideas caused in our own history. We know where that story is taking us, and it’s nowhere good.
I highly recommend this series to anyone who enjoys war fantasy, magical protagonists learning how to use their powers, and maybe wants to see a non-Euro-centric take on the genre. These books are about an extremely vicious political struggle, and also one scared girl’s drive to leave her peasant background and make something of herself in the world, and also the consequences of selling bits of yourself to strange and powerful godlike entities, and also the atrocities that people commit because they think they’re necessary (or because they want revenge, or because they’re scared, or because they didn’t think about the consequences). I think I like The Dragon Republic more than the previous novel in the series, because we don’t have to spend time with the same “gifted child learning to become magic in an academy setting” shtick that we’ve seen so many times before. I do like that sort of story, mind you, but spending so much of The Poppy War in an academic setting didn’t really prepare me for the shock when the war ramped up and full-on sickening Rape of Nanking style war crimes started happening. In The Dragon Republic we go into the book knowing full well that these are books where awful things can happen at the drop of a hat, which makes it easier to deal with when they happen.
As a side note, I should warn potential readers of The Poppy War series that there are some massive trigger warnings for gore and rape. Both happen in both books–not all the time, but when they do they aren’t brushed over or moved past. They leave a lasting impact. The atrocities committed by the Muganese soldiers in The Poppy War are especially haunting, and I really feel like I have a duty to warn you ahead of time so that you don’t go into it as blind as I was. I wasn’t joking when I compared them to the Rape of Nanking, and if you know anything about that series of war crimes then that should tell you everything you need to know. The Dragon Republic doesn’t have anything nearly as bad as that, for which I’m grateful.
I’m very much looking forward to the third novel in this series. The Phoenix wants to burn the world, and Rin ends the novel in absolute agreement with that goal, because some betrayals can only be repaid in blood. Let’s get to it.