Review of The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

*The Poppy War* by R.F. Kuang (2018). Published by Harper Voyage.

Welcome! If you’re new here and stumbled on this blog through the mythical, magical powers of the Internet (I’m going to guess it was a Google search), I’m glad to have you here in my digital home. My name is Ashley, and this website/blog serves as an archive

Once upon a time I worked professionally as a film and television critic at an online outlet, and did all of the film festival rounds and the fun, wonky stuff you would imagine a critic did. I got tired of that, although it was a lot of fun at times, and I wanted to focus more on the kinds of movies and television shows that made me sing: aka, mainly BIPOC and international cinema and literature.

And that’s how this blog post came to be! I started my own blog, which makes me a few pennies here and there from the little advertisements hovering around. I also lost a major employment opportunity for me in late 2024, and while it’s been such a struggle trying to find a job in the mean time because of the way the world is going, I decided to step back and work on this blog for a bit.

I am extremely privileged and grateful that I have the finances and support in order to do such a thing while I’m job hunting, as I’ve also been able to read a lot of books I’ve been meaning to during this time, and I am catching up on all of the Korean and Chinese dramas I’ve been wanting to watch for years.

Recently I made a huge request order at my local library for a handful of books I’ve wanted to read, and R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War was one of them. I didn’t expect to get it so soon from the wait list, but it arrived with my other six books at the local library pretty quickly.

I’ve read almost all of Kuang’s books at this point, and every time I keep questioning as to why I keep returning to her work. I think she’s such an incredibly skilled author at wordbuilding and is so intelligent in how she fuses together her academic background with her writing. At the same time, I’m not the biggest fan of her work because the characters feel static and she tends to slap you in the face with the themes she’s pushing onto the characters.

I wanted to see how The Poppy War handles its themes and subject compared to Yellowface and Babel, and I read the book across two nights. On the second night I was invested enough that I read 400 pages in one sitting just to finish the book so I could move onto an advanced copy novel that had an approaching deadline.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

Rin, a poor shopkeeper from the south, is selected to attend one of the most elite academies in the empire—but not without trials.

The main character in this novel is Rin, an orphan taken in by her relatives that really don’t want her there. She works in the day as a shopkeeper at their store, but right at the beginning of the novel, they want to sell her off through marriage to a powerful individual. Rin really doesn’t want that, so she steals opium from her relatives, then bribes a local teacher to tutor her to take an exam to try and get into an elite academy.

It won’t be easy, as she’s from a poor province and people literally spend their entire lives studying for this exam. But Rin is willing to do whatever it takes to escape her fate, and she will go as far as to hurt herself to stay awake and study. When the time comes and she takes the test, she scores first in the entire province, which is unheard of.

Suddenly Rin is sent away Sinegard, the school where the elites of the military are trained. There, she’s going to run into the cream of the crop, the daughters and sons of the elites of Nikan. She’s clearly undertrained compared to the rest of the gang, and they’re going to make fun of her country accent and how dark skinned she is.

Her top enemy is Nezha, the son of the Dragon Warlord. He’s the favorite of all of the teachers here because of his status, and Rin and he are sworn enemies from the start. She has to prove her worth by defeating him of all people, a trained warrior from birth, even if she has major disadvantages even in the classroom.

It’s at Sinegard that Rin is going to learn what it takes to achieve her goals, and when she gets the attention of the Lore master, dubbed an insane madman by the rest of the school, it leads her down a path where she learns she wasn’t who she thought she was.

And when Mugen invades Nikan and it becomes brutal, her friends and she are going to learn what it means to be in war. We’re going to watch as Rin slowly loses her own humanity, sent away to the secret unit “for freaks,” and the novel takes a very dark turn.

This portion of the novel is very very dark—I say this as a warning if you have not read it already, as Kuang takes no liberties in sparing you from the gore of war. There is an entire genocide sequence in the novel that’s absolutely horrific to read about, so if you can’t handle it, I would take a step back or maybe skip some of those descriptions. They’re very graphic.

There were very clear references to Chinese and Japanese culture throughout this novel (Nikan and Mugen were definitely based on China and Japan respectively), as well as Buddhism. I was squinting at Altan’s full name (Trengsin) and was trying to see if it was a reference to the Tibetans, and that this was an overt political statement of China and Tibet, but the other Buddhist references throughout the novel were pretty clear to me.

Overall Thoughts

Like Kuang’s other novels, I thought the world building in this book was also brilliant. She’s incredibly talented in sucking you into the universe of her books and letting you be immersed in the characters’ worlds. I also don’t know how she writes so much while being a scholar—truly, kudos to her. I envy that.

I want to love Kuang’s work, and I think that’s why I keep picking these books up. I just thought The Poppy War falls short with the characters, and while I understand this is a trilogy, I didn’t get why some of the characters make the decisions they do or the logistics behind their actions. Maybe it’s explained in a later book, but I was unsatisfied with where we ended with and why we got there.

I’m familiar with Chinese history and what exactly this novel is based on as well, including the Rape of Nanjing (which is a stand in for a certain series of events in the novel in the real world). I imagine the testing labs were based on Unit 731 in the real world, which makes me wonder if books like these should have forewords explaining the inspiration and history.

I did my own master’s thesis on Korean women’s literature during this period, and while I was consumed with the Korean side of these things, I really recognize how the Mugen were aligned with Japanese ideologies (like the blind loyalty to the emperor/willing to straight up kill themselves for the empire/the racial hierachies), but because we’re limited to Rin’s perspective and knowledge, they become a bit of a caricature. We hit on that at the end of the book, when a character directly calls her out, so I hope we expand on that later.

In the end, it may feel like fiction to the reader who didn’t know and won’t do their research. But these happened to real people in horrific and terrible ways. It wasn’t fiction. Some readers might not realize that and some hand holding might help. It’s really a book about war and its tragedies, not a random YA fantasy novel.

Regardless, if you haven’t read this and want to, I think it’s worth picking up at least once. I wanted to give it a shot, and while I don’t know if I’ll read the rest of the trilogy, I’m glad I gave this a chance.

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