V171 reviewed Burning God by R.F. Kuang
None
1 star
I guess trigger warning for a brutal review.
There was a time when I found it to be fun to hate read books, but this has shifted something within me. I knew I would hate this, I walked in knowing it would be 1 star. But I was still surprised with how bad it was. It was so bad that I don't think I can ever hate read a book again because it will just remind me of how bad this book was.
There are people who are more knowledgeable and more well read than I, who have written extensively about how this trilogy is, at best, derivative but at worst plagiarism of The Rape of Nanking. I have not read that book, so I won't speak to that. But in my opinion, that alone warrants a 0-1 star for this book and this trilogy. My goal here is to …
I guess trigger warning for a brutal review.
There was a time when I found it to be fun to hate read books, but this has shifted something within me. I knew I would hate this, I walked in knowing it would be 1 star. But I was still surprised with how bad it was. It was so bad that I don't think I can ever hate read a book again because it will just remind me of how bad this book was.
There are people who are more knowledgeable and more well read than I, who have written extensively about how this trilogy is, at best, derivative but at worst plagiarism of The Rape of Nanking. I have not read that book, so I won't speak to that. But in my opinion, that alone warrants a 0-1 star for this book and this trilogy. My goal here is to convince you that, even if this was not a direct ripoff of that work, it still is a terrible book by almost every metric. It is so bad that not only am I confused by the broad appeal, but I don't even know how this got published or made it off the desk of an editor at the outset.
I won't provide a plot summary of this book since it is the third in a series and I don't care enough to do so. Just know that we are wrapping up our time with Rin and her conflict with her homeland and its civil war.
The characters here are exactly what you would expect if you've made it this far in the series. They're all horrible. Not only because they're all unlikable, but they are horribly written. Every single one can be boiled down to a one-word character trait. No one develops or grows. Every interaction is completely predictable because everyone acts the same way throughout the entire series. Rin's single word character trait is 'idiot'.
The pacing is terrible. We are either in a poorly described action sequence filled with angst and rage, describing the horrific gore of battle or war, or in an inane conversation between two terribly written characters. There is a predictable cycle to this, but also each of these are so badly written that I started to appreciate how cyclical the narrative was because I knew exactly what was coming next.
Kuang may have grown a lot as a writer since writing these books, but one of the biggest criticisms I have seen about her latest works holds true here as well and it is probably my greatest gripe about this entire reading experience. She thinks her readers are idiots. The way themes are explored and communicated was rage inducing. She just does not trust the reader for a moment to come to the conclusion that she is bashing you in the face with, so she has to waste the time of the reader having her horrible characters repeat whatever point she's trying to make to each other. And then basically, in the author voice, shakes us by the shoulders and repeats the point MULTIPLE TIMES again. Any given passage sounds exactly like this:
brutal description of how war has decimated farming and thusly destroyed local economies
Rin turns to Venka and says "I had no idea that war would decimate local economies."
Venka stares at Rin before saying "Yes, laying siege to settlements causes crops to die. The settlements then starve, not to mention being unable to sell their crops."
Rin had never considered this before. The price of war.
Venka continues "When the Muganese occupied this province, they prevented the farming here. The settlement starved."
Rin wondered how the economy in the province would recover without the sales of the crops.
This is something that is not often discussed about war, the casualties that exist outside of mutilated bodies. The impact that lasts far beyond the fighting.
"What will be do about this then?" Rin wondered aloud.
Venka shrugged "I don't know that there is anything to do. The settlement was lost when they starved. They couldn't recover economically without food to sell. This is something that has been happening all over the nation as a result of this war."
Rin balked, having not thought about this prior to this moment. How can they hope to recover when starvation and economic disaster are a direct cause of this war?
At a certain point I was just laughing. It was such BAD writing. I can't bring myself to understand how this made it past an editor. How the author can have such little faith in the reader. "Show not tell" is in the writing 101 curriculum, but I think authors need a reminder that having two characters talk about your point is also "telling," not showing. I had such secondhand embarrassment whenever Kuang took a break from poorly 'YA-ing' The Rape of Nanking to poorly try to communicate the takeaways from The Rape of Nanking to us.
This was horrible, I'll never read another book by the author. And while I'm very much pro "read and enjoy whatever you want," this is one of those few times that I can't understand what there is to like about any part of this trilogy.
