Review: Natural Beauty

Title: Natural Beauty

Author: Ling Ling Huang

Genre: Contemporary/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (major), sexism, misogyny (mentions, from antagonist), sexual content, death, medical content, medical trauma, sexual assault, pregnancy (mentions), death of parent (mentions), vomit, cannibalism (mentions), bullying (mentions), drug use (dubious consent), unreality

Back Cover:

Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a staggering cost.

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents—also talented musicians—who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City.

Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures—from remoras that suck out cheap Botox to eyelash extensions made of spider silk—and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege and gives her a long-awaited sense of belonging. She becomes transfixed by Helen, the niece of Holistik’s charismatic owner, and the two strike up a friendship that hazily veers into more. All the while, our narrator is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

A piercing, darkly funny debut, Natural Beauty explores questions of consumerism, self-worth, race, and identity—and leaves readers with a shocking and unsettling truth.

Review:

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.

Review: He Who Drowned the World

Title: He Who Drowned the World

Series: Radiant Emperor duology #2

Author: Shelley Parker-Chan

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Violence, blood, injury, death, bullying, self-harm (graphic), grief (severe), sexual content (explicit), misogyny, ableism, sexual assault, miscarriage, infidelity, murder, child death, parent death (mentions), suicidal ideation, body dysmorphia, homophobia, that complicated sexual trauma where you have sex when you don’t really want to as a means to get something else

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the first book, She Who Became the Sun.

Back Cover:

How much would you give to win the world?

Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory that tore southern China from its Mongol masters. Now she burns with a new desire: to seize the throne and crown herself emperor.

But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband—and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map. To stay in the game, Zhu will have to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the talented but unstable eunuch general Ouyang, who has already sacrificed everything for a chance at revenge on his father’s killer, the Great Khan.

Unbeknownst to the southerners, a new contender is even closer to the throne. The scorned scholar Wang Baoxiang has maneuvered his way into the capital, and his lethal court games threaten to bring the empire to its knees. For Baoxiang also desires revenge: to become the most degenerate Great Khan in history—and in so doing, make a mockery of every value his Mongol warrior family loved more than him.

All the contenders are determined to do whatever it takes to win. But when desire is the size of the world, the price could be too much for even the most ruthless heart to bear…

Review:

This is a hard book to review. Not because it was bad, or even because I’m ambivalent about it – on the contrary, it was spectacular and I loved it. Even having read the first book nearly two years ago, it didn’t take me long to get back into the story. It kept me engaged throughout and even got my heart speeding up in a few particularly tense scenes. It was, above all, astonishingly good.

And I think that’s a large part of what makes it hard to review. I can’t share all the emotions it made me feel by writing about it. To get the full experience, you have to read it yourself. It’s vivid and intense and full of twists I didn’t see coming but probably should have and the kind of book that leaves you completely exhausted at the end because you’ve been feeling so much along the way.

Another part of what makes this hard to review is how utterly dark it is. The first book was dark, too, don’t get me wrong. Zhu is not a good person. She is ruthless and ambitious and claims she is willing to sacrifice anything to reach her goal, and this book puts that to the test. This is also a book where Zhu starts to challenge the bounds of a likeable character. In the first book, she was ruthless and ambitious and violent and did a lot of really horrible things. But in the context of a world that would rather let her starve than inconvenience a man, it didn’t seem unreasonable. In this book, she had reached some measure of security – though still under threat, she was one of the four dominant military and political powers of the area. But her ambition to be the greatest kept her pushing onwards, even as she destroyed others in the process. She was still a dynamic, compelling character and I never really stopped rooting for her, but as the book progressed I found myself repeatedly confronting the reality of her actions and not really being sure how to feel about them. In some ways, it feels weird to even apply moral judgements here, though I can’t fully explain why. But eventually both I and Zhu were looking at the consequences of her ambitions and wondering if it was really worth all that.

(Yet another thing I appreciate about this series: None of the women in these books – whether or not you want to count Zhu and her ambiguous gender identity as a woman – are shamed for their ambition or treated any worse than the men for their crimes. The society is blatantly misogynistic, but the narrative refuses to be.)

General Ouyang was a major player in the last book, and he still is in this one, but to a lesser degree. Some of that is because of his arc. Following on the events from the climax of book one, his is an equal but opposite story to Zhu. While Zhu’s ambitions propelled her to further heights, Ouyang’s relentless pursuit of revenge drove him to further lows. Zhu’s resolve clarified as Ouyang’s mind descended into chaos. I found myself mainly feeling compassion as he destroyed himself on the teeth of his own self-loathing. I wish he could have had a better ending, but he was so far gone that I think he got the best he could.

This book, being the last in the series, was an ending for every character, though not all of them died. Writing-wise, their endings made sense, fit with their arcs, and felt narratively satisfying. On a personal level, so many of them deserved better. Xu Da deserved better. Ma deserved better. Ouyang deserved better. Even Baoxiang deserved better (he deserved better last book, and even before – he is yet another case of an antagonist who I really just feel bad for).

And this brings me to the final reason this book is so hard to review: There is just too much to say. I haven’t said anything about Baoxiang’s story, even though he was a point of view narrator. I haven’t talked about the gender politics involved in this story, or the absolutely spot-on depictions of that very specific and hard-to-define type of sexual trauma where you have sex when you really don’t want to or with someone you don’t want to have sex with as a means to get something else, or the theme of being seen in a gendered body (and, to a lesser extent, a visibly disabled body), or how it’s paced so well that it feels like so much is happening without ever feeling rushed or monotonous, or the really awesome historical setting, or the ghosts.

If I talked about every amazing thing in this book, I could go on forever. But I’ve focused this review mainly on the characters, because despite all the action and adventure and ghosts and politics and invasions, this is a story about these characters and how their actions, good, bad, or otherwise, shape (and often end) the lives of the people around them and, ultimately, the course of history. This feels like a book (and, honestly, a series) that you could keep re-reading and discover something new every time. (It helps that these books are long.) So few sequels live up to their predecessor, but this one does – but it’s also unique to the point where I can’t say whether She Who Became the Sun or He Who Drowned the World is better because they’re both so good for different reasons and in different ways.

I’m running out of eloquent ways to say “this is an amazing book, you should read the whole series,” so there you go. This is an amazing book. So was the first one. You should read both – especially if you like stories that show your emotions no mercy.

The Radiant Emperor duology:

1. She Who Became the Sun
2. He Who Drowned the World

Review: Phoenix Extravagant

Title: Phoenix Extravagant

Author: Yoon Ha Lee

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: War, death, confinement, violence, blood, parent death (mentions), romantic partner death (mentions), injury, body horror (mild), torture (mild), excrement (mentions), colonialism, racism (mild), sexual content

Back Cover:

Gyen Jebi isn’t a fighter or a subversive. They just want to paint.

One day they’re jobless and desperate; the next, Jebi finds themself recruited by the Ministry of Armor to paint the mystical sigils that animate the occupying government’s automaton soldiers.

But when Jebi discovers the depths of the Razanei government’s horrifying crimes–and the awful source of the magical pigments they use–they find they can no longer stay out of politics.

What they can do is steal Arazi, the ministry’s mighty dragon automaton, and find a way to fight…

Review:

I really like the idea of magical art. That, and the idea of stealing a magical dragon automaton to fight against an invading government sounded hopelessly cool. Plus a nonbinary protagonist in a magical East Asian setting had to be great. I had pretty high hopes for this book.

And overall, it was … fine. It was good enough to finish and had some interesting ideas, but it never fully grabbed me.

The world was interesting, although I spent more time than was good for my story comprehension trying to place exactly what the setting was. (It took me a while to determine it was probably a fantasy version of the Japanese occupation of Korea, but I still wasn’t completely sure of that until I checked the author’s site.) I also found the societal structure and the role of an artist in how society was set up interesting. I don’t know how much was historically accurate and how much was made up for the story (besides the obvious), but it was interesting regardless.

Normally I spend some time in my reviews talking about the characters. But that’s hard to do here because there’s not a lot to them. Jebi gets into conflict with their sister because of differing values – their sister values patriotism and ideals, while Jebi values survival more. (And that made it easy to dislike their sister, since I also value survival more.) Jebi enjoyed painting and art, and that’s about it. From the back cover, I expected them to have a bit more revolutionary spirit. But in fact, Jebi can’t fight at all and actively avoids political involvement.

That strongly contributed to the fact that very little happens in the book. The whole stealing-the-dragon part doesn’t happen until nearly three quarters of the way through. It had its moments of awesomeness, but overall it was incredibly slow and tipped over into dull and boring several times. Jebi spends a lot of time feeling guilty and sorry for themself, and even the bits about the value of art as a cultural artifact and for its own sake felt like an aside that never really got fleshed out.

I like a lot of the ideas here. The ideas were why I picked up the book, and the foundations here are solid. As it is, Phoenix Extravagant isn’t bad. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, and there were some genuinely great moments. But on the whole, I think I would have liked it more as a faster, more action-based story with a more dynamic protagonist.

Review: She Who Became the Sun

Title: She Who Became the Sun

Series: The Radiant Emperor Duology #1

Author: Shelley Parker-Chan

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: War, death, death of children, misogyny (severe), sexism, injury, blood, gore, vomit (mentions), animal death (mentions), fire (mentions), racism, body shaming, ableism (severe), death of parents, cannibalism (briefly implied), alcohol use, classism, dysphoria (minor), toxic relationship

Back Cover:

“I refuse to be nothing…”

In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness…

In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother’s identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu uses takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother’s abandoned greatness.

Review:

I put a hold on this audiobook at the library, and I’ll admit, when it came ready I wondered what I was thinking. I’ve read a lot of Chinese- and East Asian-inspired fantasy lately, including a completely different one that was also a fantasy version of a real ruler of China’s journey to power. But I’ve also DNF’d many, many other similar books recently. So I was a little skeptical going in.

Everything on the back cover is basically the setup for the story. The girl does not get a name, either because her father and brother don’t think her important enough to use it or her family never bothered to give her one in the first place. Surrounded by famine so terrible that people have resorted to truly terrible means, there was no reason to put effort into keeping a daughter alive when you could instead save a son.

But the girl lives. She takes her brother’s name and identity to enter a monastery where there would be food. There she discovers how far she will go to survive. She believes her true fate is nothingness and death, but if she has a strong enough will, she can convince Heaven itself that she should live.

That is the story. It is a monk who is not a woman* but who must hide her woman’s body, whose choices are nothingness or greatness and who will sacrifice anything, even breaking her own heart in the process, to seize her fate. As a girl child in a world that would rather let a girl die than let a boy be uncomfortable, she chose to live by any means necessary.

She is not a good person, but she is a strongly compelling character, a queer anti-hero who does many things that are morally dubious or outright wrong but who I still want to see succeed.

Her journey is set against a war – the Red Turban Rebellion – as the Chinese attempt to overthrow their Mongol rulers. And hers is not the only perspective in the story. There is also the eunuch general of the Mongol rulers, biding his time in dubious favor with various Mongol nobility until he can get revenge for his slaughtered family. There is also Ma, engaged to the son of a Red Turban leader as the rebellion’s leadership jockeys for power, who gets significantly less page time but no less importance than the other two. The threads of fate surround everyone and draw them ever closer to their glory or doom.

This review is poetic because that’s what this book evokes. The writing style isn’t poetic, and the book itself is full of violence and gore and hatred, but the story feels like an epic saga, the kind of thing that gets put to song and sung throughout the land. I occasionally had a difficult time keeping the names straight – though I’m pretty sure that’s a limitation of reading it as an audiobook – and the sheer excess of misogyny was hard to read at times. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. The sequel hasn’t even been announced yet, but there is going to be one and I can’t wait.

*About gender and pronouns in the book: Though raised as a girl until age 9-ish, Zhu declares herself not to be a girl. She presents as a man and uses he/him pronouns with others, but declares herself to be in a space between or outside the two genders, neither male nor female. The parts of the book that are from her perspective use she/her pronouns for her, so that’s what I use in this review.

The Radiant Emperor Duology:

1. She Who Became the Sun
2. He Who Drowned the World (August 2023)

Review: Not Your Sidekick

Title: Not Your Sidekick

Series: Sidekick Squad #1

Author: C.B. Lee

Genre: Superhero with Dystopian vibes

Trigger Warnings: Misgendering (one instance, accidental and immediately corrected), kidnapping, imprisonment/confinement, kidnapping of parents, injury, violence, racism/xenophobia (by an obviously evil character), needles, being injected with something without consent

Back Cover:

Welcome to Andover… where superpowers are common, but internships are complicated. Just ask high school nobody, Jessica Tran. Despite her heroic lineage, Jess is resigned to a life without superpowers and is merely looking to beef up her college applications when she stumbles upon the perfect (paid!) internship—only it turns out to be for the town’s most heinous supervillain. On the upside, she gets to work with her longtime secret crush, Abby, who Jess thinks may have a secret of her own. Then there’s the budding attraction to her fellow intern, the mysterious “M,” who never seems to be in the same place as Abby. But what starts as a fun way to spite her superhero parents takes a sudden and dangerous turn when she uncovers a plot larger than heroes and villains altogether.

Review:

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into this book. I needed a book for work, this one was immediately available at the library. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

On the whole, this book was really just fun. There is some dark stuff that happens, high schoolers nearly dying, and some heavy themes, but despite all of that the prevailing mood reading this story is fun. There’s superhero stuff and a big conspiracy, sure, but there’s also friendship and crushes and romances and high school and in a way it portrays how complicated life is. Jess may have parents and an older sister who are literally superheroes, but she still has to deal with school and internships and a crush on a girl who probably isn’t even into girls.

I hope the world gets explored further in the rest of the series, because it was fascinating. It’s set in the future, where people watch TV on holoscreens and cars are so self-driving they don’t have steering wheels at all and roombas have AI and personalities. And, of course, superheroes exist and are big stars. At first there are only hints that all may not be as cool as it seems, but as Jess and friends start to uncover the big conspiracy, it begins to look like this is a dystopian world where the people in charge are so thorough that nobody even realizes their world is dystopian. I expect and hope there will be more on that in book two.

On one hand, I do have a tendency to guess plot surprises way ahead of time. On the other hand, I feel like all the superhero-related surprises were telegraphed from a mile away. Everything that was superpower- or secret identity-related and trying to be a plot twist I called almost immediately. However, I didn’t guess anything related to the big conspiracy. And even though I guessed all the superhero-related twists, I didn’t mind too much because I was just having fun with the story.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable book. Not perfect and leaning towards the “mindless entertainment” end of the scale, but I enjoyed it a lot and it was an absolutely fun read. And the biggest plot thread in the book didn’t get wrapped up hardly at all, so I totally intend to read the next book.

The Sidekick Squad series:

1. Not Your Sidekick
2. Not Your Villain
3. Not Your Backup

Review: Forest of a Thousand Lanterns (DNF)

Title: Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

Series: Rise of the Empress #1

Author: Julie C. Dao

Genre: Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Physical, verbal, and emotional abuse by a parent figure/relative; death of parent (mention); blood and scabs; death of animals; mild gore

Read to: Somewhere in chapter 8

Back Cover:

An East Asian fantasy reimagining of The Evil Queen legend about one peasant girl’s quest to become Empress–and the darkness she must unleash to achieve her destiny.

Eighteen-year-old Xifeng is beautiful. The stars say she is destined for greatness, that she is meant to be Empress of Feng Lu. But only if she embraces the darkness within her. Growing up as a peasant in a forgotten village on the edge of the map, Xifeng longs to fulfill the destiny promised to her by her cruel aunt, the witch Guma, who has read the cards and seen glimmers of Xifeng’s majestic future. But is the price of the throne too high?

Because in order to achieve greatness, she must spurn the young man who loves her and exploit the callous magic that runs through her veins–sorcery fueled by eating the hearts of the recently killed. For the god who has sent her on this journey will not be satisfied until his power is absolute.

Review:

This was on my top 5 list of books I wanted to read in 2020, and yet I did not end up finishing it. Not because I hated it, because I really didn’t, but because I was just ambivelent about it.

I picked this up as an audiobook to listen to while I sew (I’ve been using a lot of my quarantine downtime to sew a ton of face masks for my community). I listened to it for one sewing session of about 2 hours, which put me to somewhere in chapter 8 because I listen at 1.5X speed. When I finished sewing for the night, I turned it off. And then when I sat down to sew again the next day, I realized I wasn’t really excited to turn it on again.

It’s not that the story was bad. It just started really, really slowly. In 8 chapters, 2+ hours worth of listening, Xifeng finally ran away from her abusive aunt Guma, and she and the boy she likes are traveling towards the imperial city. That’s about it.

Xifeng as a character, I mostly liked. She’s unapologetically selfish and a little emotionally stunted, which made her hard to connect with, but I know it’s an intentional choice and if the story around her had been more interesting I think it would have been better. I couldn’t really get on board with the whole “life is tragic because I’m too beautiful” thing that she had going on, but the abuse victim angle rang true (major trigger warning for abuse) and I rooted for her because of that.

Wei, the young man who loves her, I did not like much at all, and so the romance angle didn’t work at all for me. I get that Xifeng liked the attention, the way he genuinely cared for her, and that he didn’t abuse her. That’s what I liked about my first boyfriend after leaving abusive parents. But he was controlling, possessive, and insisted on infantalizing her, and that threw up many, many red flags for me. It honestly made me really hope Xifeng would spurn him and embrace her dark magic because evil empress would definitely be better than ending up suffering a different kind of abuse, which is what I feared she was headed for.

I did not get much of a taste for the world in the little bit that I read. Xifeng’s village is not very interesting, and the traveling bits up until I stopped were just going through woods and down dirt roads. Conversations with others sketched out a little bit of the other countries and politics, but that’s about it. There was some interesting little teases of mythology and magic, though – the witchcraft Guma used and little hints of a snake god who’s interested in Xifeng (possibly possessing her? It wasn’t really clear but it was definitely tantalizing). If I was reading on for anything, it would have been for that.

From other reviews I’ve seen, the story sounds like it picks up once Xifeng reaches the imperial city. But I don’t really care to get that far. Life’s too short to read bad books (or books I don’t care about), and besides, one of my reading resolutions this year was to stop reading things I wasn’t 100% excited to continue with. This isn’t a bad book and I’m sure there’s people out there who will love it – I just didn’t find it compelling enough to keep reading.

The Rise of the Empress series:

1. Forest of a Thousand Lanterns
2. Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix
3. Song of the Crimson Flower (spinoff – different characters in the same world)