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The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Posted on: August 5, 2019
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The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
published May 2018
where I got it: purchased new
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I don’t know what I was expecting when I bought this book. I’d heard good things about it, it got some buzz when it came out, and then it fell off my radar. I knew it was about a kid who attends an elite military academy, gets embroiled in a war, and has to risk everything.
when I read the back cover copy, my first thought was “is this a fantasy version of Ender’s Game?” Hahahahah!!!! yeah . . . . nope. More like Name of the Wind if written by Robin Hobb and then half way through Ian Tregillis took over in the vein of the Bitter Seeds books.
I meant to keep this review light and happy and talk about the plot and Rin’s adventures at school and how cute it is that she has no idea how to talk to boys she likes, and that she’s great at memorizing facts but shitty at martial arts. I meant to write a super happy funtime book review.
That didn’t happen.
Good news first! The Dragon Republic (book 2) is already out! You can read books 1 and 2 back to back!
The Poppy War does start out fairly light and happy – a war orphan, Rin, needs to escape her opium smuggling foster family before they marry her off, so she studies for the imperial exam and hopes for a scholarship. Not only does she do well on the imperial exam, she has the highest score in her prefecture and gains a full scholarship to Nikan’s elite military academy Sinegard. Rin doesn’t care what she studies, she doesn’t care about dorm life, she just knows that school means she won’t have to marry a stranger and that she’ll get three meals a day, and that after graduation she won’t have to go home.
She’s by far the poorest most provincial kid at the school, and is relentlessly bullied by wealthier upper class students and a few teachers as well. But, like I said, none of them are forcing her to get married or get involved with opium smuggling, so she shrugs it off. I thought it was so cute that Rin has no idea how to talk to boys she likes – she thinks they are cute, she ends up staring at them, but has zero idea how to talk to them. It was funny and adorable. And as dark as the end of this book gets, I was thankful for these cute light scenes at the beginning.
This is not one of those long, drawn out school chronicles, where each book is one year at school. The Poppy War is ultra fast paced. Kuang deftly uses a few school scenes for worldbuilding, where the students are discussing world history, with the professor telling them what really happened. Oh, and a whole shit-ton of other awesome stuff happens that I won’t spoil for you.
Before you know it, Rin’s first year of school is over and she’s pledged to study Lore under the school’s weirdest professor, Jiang. Doesn’t hurt that she easily recognized the hallucinogens in his garden. He is saddened that her goal is to become a good soldier.
So, Jiang and Lore. why would a military school offer classes on lore, mythology, and shamanism? Why indeed.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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