She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan)

She Who Became the Sun
The Radiant Emperor series, Book 1
Shelley Parker-Chan
Tor
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Historical Fiction
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In 1345, China suffers under the heels of Mongolian conquerors. On a dead farm in a dying village stricken by years-long drought, one boy is foretold to rise to greatness, while his sister's fortune is nothing. Then bandits come to take what little they have left. In the aftermath, the boy Zhu Chongba and his father lie dead, and the girl is left with a slender chance at a future: by taking her dead brother's name, perhaps she can take his fortune as well, and become great. To do this, she will have to do more than just wish it, or wear a boy's garb and take a boy's name. She will have to struggle, suffer, and burn with her desire for greatness until the heavens themselves cannot deny her, until she outshines the sun itself.

REVIEW: Inspired by the rise of the first Ming emperor of China, She Who Became the Sun presents a vivid, often brutal exploration of the path to greatness and the desires that drive people to both bold and terrible acts. From the first page, the girl who will take the name of Zhu is a fighter; in a village where most every other girl has died - no family would waste scant food on a girl if they had a boy to feed, and other girls were either traded away to bandits or quietly vanished - she relies on skill and pure determination to survive. Hearing the village fortune teller give his verdict that she is to be nothing is a blow that sends her reeling, until the death of her brother opens up the possibility of a future that few, if any, other girls would even dare consider in her culture and era. It also gives her the unusual gift of seeing ghosts, part of the underlying fantastical elements of the story (along with the visible aura-like fires of the "mandate of Heaven" that great leaders can burn with, and perhaps a certain tangibility of Fate's threads binding Zhu and others to each other and to their destinies). Zhu starts out with little idea of what form of greatness she is grasping for, mostly concerned with mere survival, but slowly begins piecing together a clearer picture of the future she wants, the path that she determines to walk whether or not she was originally fated to do so. Every obstacle and setback only deepens her determination, spurred both by her unquenchable desire and her fear that the fortune teller was right and she truly is meant to be nothing. Meanwhile, other characters have their own desires and destinies driving them onward, from two conquering princes to a bitter eunuch to the compassionate woman promised to a foolhardy rebel general and more. Their tales unfold in a story rich in period culture details, with vivid settings and intricate power plays, military and political and personal. Nobody's hands or consciences are entirely clean by the end, some feeling the burden more than others as ends justify increasingly cruel and deadly means. It made for an enjoyable, if sometimes brutal, tale that kept my interest from start to finish.

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