She has been bred as a tool of destruction, and now her masters intend to use her. Rin, for her part, turns the war into an outlet for mounting power as the series progresses. And as the risks are raised, so are the stakes and the consequent moral ambiguities. Petty rivalries become obsolete Rin and her classmates are all just fighting to survive. If part one is a typical boarding school romp, with petty rivalries, tedious lectures, and a rousing tournament, then part two is what happens when boarding school ceases to exist and all the teachers are dead. There is a definite before and after, with war being the dividing line. Reading The Poppy War feels almost like reading two books at once. “Amateurs obsess over strategy,” Rin’s professor tells the class. Politics and strategy play a major role in this military fantasy series, with characters often quoting Sunzi, a lionized writer and tactician who serves as a stand-in for Sun Tzu, the real-life Chinese general and military strategist of the late sixth century BC. War is on the horizon, with the Federation of Mugen, a crescent-shaped island nation to the east of Nikan, encroaching on her borders, despite a Non-Aggression Pact signed at the end of the Second Poppy War. The themes of economic anxiety paired with looming standardized tests that determine one’s fate will likely resonate with young readers today.Īfter months of self-mutilation, sleep deprivation, and the exercise of sheer willpower, Rin places at the top of her province. Determined to cram a decade of missed schooling into two years, Rin employs tactics such as dripping hot wax onto her skin to force herself to study. Despite having little formal education, Rin is aiming to enroll in Sinegard, the most prestigious military academy in the empire and the only one with free tuition.

The first book, The Poppy War, opens with 14-year-old Rin in Tikany, an antiquated village where an unmarried girl is “worth less than a gay rooster.” In order to escape an odious arranged marriage, Rin studies for the Keju, a kind of standardized test that closely resembles the civil service examinations of China’s Song dynasty. Kuang, with the first installment published in 2018 and the final installment, The Burning God, published this November. The Poppy War trilogy is a grimdark fantasy series by R. Her drive to accumulate power is motivated, above all else, by a growing thirst for vengeance. (There are clear parallels with 20th-century China.) Instead, as a dark-skinned orphan from a backwater province, she is fueled by a deep-rooted sense of injustice, an instinctive understanding of the imbalance in the world. Yet Rin is unwilling to become a mindless tool for Nikan, the recently unified empire of 12 provinces.

“CHILDREN CEASED to be children when you put a sword in their hands,” protagonist Rin muses after she’s placed in her country’s top military academy, where she’s taught to discard her sense of self and join the war machine.

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