R.F. Kuang’s name has been making the rounds lately due to her new novel Babel which critics have been talking up. She’s a Chinese-American writer whose work is new to me and browsing through her published work I was more intrigued by her debut novel. It’s set in a fantasy version of China that is weakened by internal disunity and widespread addiction to opium. It follows the story of a female young orphan who enrolls into the country’s top military and in that sense feels similar to many of the webfiction series around today. Unfortunately while I liked the worldbuilding and the early parts of the novel, to me, it goes off the rails as the action picks up and turned me off completely. I will not be reading the sequels of this trilogy.

Orphaned by the previous Poppy War in which the neighboring island nation of Mugen invaded Nikan, Rin is raised by foster parents who do not love her. Rather than be forced into a marriage with an old man, she is determined to excel at the national examinations enough to win her a place at the elite academy in the nation’s capital. Naturally she succeeds though it takes a great deal of effort. She arrives at the capital as a penniless peasant, looked down on by her classmates who are all the children of ministers and warlords. She trains under the Elders there despite the discrimination. When she is banned from the martial arts classes of the traditionalist Jun, she is taken under the wing of the eccentric Jiang. Jiang is the sole teacher of a subject called Lore that most regard to be superstition but that according to legend is capable of evoking feats of magic. But before Rin is able to complete her studies, Mugen invades Nikan and the entire class as well as their teachers is embroiled in a war against an enemy far more powerful than they are.

The setup for the novel, with the school setting and the young orphan protagonist, is familiar. The wider world in it may not be as familiar to Western readers but it is to me and I really dug the idea of exploring it in fictionalized form. Nikara is of course China in an era when gunpowder exists and shamanism is thought to be a myth. Nikan, militaristic and technologically more advanced, is Japan. The Western nations are present too but are not directly involved in the events of this book. A pivotal event in this version of history is that Nikan massacred the inhabitants of the island of Speerly in the previous war. The Speerlies were considered part of Nikan but are culturally and ethnically distinct with darker skin. They were also believed to be Nikara’s most powerful warriors and capable of using fire as weapons. As Rin later learns, their powers come from their connection to their fire god, the Phoenix, so shamanism is all too real. There are intriguing references that someone with a bit of knowledge about Chinese myths will get: Jiang Ziya for example, a berserker warrior who channels the power of a monkey god, and so on. What’s there to not like?

As it turns out, plenty. I enjoyed how the novel takes its time to set up Rin’s background and her early initiation into the academy. After her first year there however, the novel speeds up the pace to blistering levels. The story rushes through the rest of Rin’s years at school, throws her into the war against Mugen, fight through multiple battles and much more. I’m all for fast-paced stories but this is ridiculous. One character is Rin’s worst enemy in school one moment and the next they fight back to back as partners. This sort of heel-face turn character development is expected in such stories of course but not in the space of a couple of chapters. The plot moves so fast that it feels like everything happens in the early doesn’t matter at all. At every stage of her life, Rin meets a new set of characters and leaves the old set behind. She barely thinks about their fates, even as Mugen sacks city after city and massacre her countrymen by the thousands. It’s very frustrating to read, makes Rin a very difficult character to sympathize with and the difference in tone between the beginning of the book and the end is just so jarring.

Yet what really kills the novel for me is how it combines Young Adult novel-quality of psychological development for its characters and a truly excessive level of gore and atrocities. The early parts of the novel inevitably makes the reader think of Harry Potter and countless similar setups. That’s fine and the book’s depiction of the characters that inhabit this milieu is fine too. Their psychological complexity is distinctly YA-level. This matches the age of the main cast and the schoolyard level of conflict that they engage in. But then war breaks out and the characters are forced to grow up very quickly. Kuang pulls no punches in graphically describing the full extent of the horrors that humans can do to each other. There are massacres, mass rape, even the systematic torturing and killing of babies. Kuang probably wanted to highlight the very real atrocities that took place in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It makes for grim reading and apparently many readers were appreciative of learning about a detail of history that they hadn’t previously known. Unfortunately the quality of the writing and the portrayal of the characters fail to rise to the occasion. Everyone is appropriately horrified. Rin agonizes over the level of destruction she can unleash after her powers are unlocked and whether to heed the teachings of her mentor Jiang. It’s all still YA-level characterization. It’s so juvenile and insufficient when put up against serious and grim subjects like genocide and sex slavery.

I’d argue that Rin having superpowers trivializes the subject even more. Her power is simply to burn things with fire and her primary form of internal conflict is how far she should go in letting it loose. It’s easy to see how this might be a metaphor for using atomic bombs against the Japanese and that would be a fascinating avenue of exploration. Unfortunately none of the characters in this novel are equipped to meaningfully engage with this dilemma. Rin’s commander is a rage-fueled monster with no restraint whatsoever. Jiang plays the part of the wise and mysterious old man who keeps repeating vague warnings. It’s so very shallow and unsatisfying. The sheer destructive power also overwhelms the rest of the worldbuilding. Lessons about history, strategy and martial arts? Who cares when you can just pour on the fire. The novel fails even as military fiction because the author is uninterested in giving us a proper description of the capabilities of the armies of the era. They seem to have gunpowder, for example, so does that mean that everyone uses guns? But then why Rin and her fellow students study melee weapons and unarmed martial arts? It makes no sense!

As far as I”m concerned this is a bad book and I see no redeeming qualities in it at all. I can easily name over a dozen pieces of webfiction out there about heroic female protagonists that I enjoy much more. As I write this, Babel has just been named a Nebula finalist. I have people who I trust tell me that Babel is very different from this book and is well worth reading. That may be so and I may yet get around to reading it if it wins. But the writing in this one is so bad that I really don’t want to.