He Who Drowned the World
Feb. 11th, 2025 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkExam over, so I finally have time to finish my book review!
I read "She Who Became the Sun" by Shelley Parker-Chan 3.5 years ago and liked it a lot (review), but when the sequel finally came out and was available at the library it landed somewhere in the big pile of "books I want to read but don't have the time for right now and/or it doesn't seem like the right moment mood-wise from what I anticipate the book to be like" – near the top of that list but it's a long list.
Then on my first date with L she mentioned that she liked listening to audiobooks because she also never has enough time to read all the books but she has slightly more time to listen to audiobooks, and that made sense to me so I checked which audiobooks were available at the library, and He Who Drowned the World was, so I decided to try it out. And only then did I find out that it's one of her favorite books, bonus. (She's reading the Steerswoman books now on my recommendation and enjoying them a lot, and I enjoy getting excited live updates.)
It was the first audiobook I'd listened to in ages: usually I listen to podcasts half in the background, and with audiobooks it's more of a bother if I get distracted and miss something. That was still occasionally annoying, it's much easier to go back in a book if I miss something (easiest in a physical book.) But overall I enjoyed it: I thought the narrator, Natalie Naudus, did a good job with the voices, and getting the accurate pronounciation of the names was nice. I also read very quickly, faster than I listen, but this is a book I wouldn't have wanted to speed through anyway.
I enjoyed it a lot. It took me a bit to get into it, and I wonder if it would have been easier if I had read the first book more recently. I was initially somewhat surprised to remember to what extent this is a fairly dark series where all the main characters are terrible people in different ways; but also so fascinating that it is hard to put down.
There were four main characters this time: Zhu Yuanzhang, Ouyang, Wang Baoxiang, and Madam Zhang; and in the last part of the story there are also PoV chapters from Ma Xiuying.
Ouyang and Wang Baoxiang were so self-destructive in their desires for revenge, and Zhu so consumed by the wish to be the greatest that she seemed to forget why she wanted it; almost in contrast, Madam Zhang was "just" more "ordinary" kinds of selfish and ambitious. I really enjoyed the contrasts and similarities between the characters, and especially the way gender roles were portrayed. I loved Zhu feeling so much kinship with Ouyang, and getting to know him better and for them to become closer through her giving him pain, and him being confused why Zhu doesn't put importance in manliness but still beginning to trust Zhu so much that he's even willing to disguise himself as a women; only for him to reject and dismiss her completely once he finds out she's not a man. Of course he did, but oof.
Ouyang being so focused on his revenge that he hardly spared a thought for what his men might want to the point of walking into an ambush also fit perfectly. Yeah he got to kill the Great Khan, but it was still a defeat in the end when the appearance of his not-dead-after-all father, in whose name he'd proclaimed to seek revenge, makes him realize that it was really for nothing. Brutal move by Wang Baoxiang, who of course wanted revenge against Ouyang because of his own complicated feelings for Esen-Temur. (Tbh I'm not even sure if that really was Ouyang's father, Ouyang did think that he'd forgotten his face and Wang Baoxiang knew he only needed to make Ouyang believe for a few moments.)
Maybe one of Wang Baoxiang's most vicious moves. Wang Baoxiang deliberately uses that the court sees him as unmanly even as he resents it, he even becomes the lover of the Third Prince. But the court is in a constant power struggle, and even when the Minister of Revenue offers him a way to climb the ranks the “normal” ambitious way he opts for betrayal instead. I wasn't surprised that it was him who organized the posters accusing Madam Zhang of adultery, but I was very surprised by their marriage! What a scheme. He allies with Lady Ki to protect her son and with that his own position as his lover, but it goes wrong because the Empress was lying too and the Third Prince dies. I should have expected it but it was still brutal when/how it happened. No wonder Lady Ki wanted revenge after, the surprise was more that she was allowed to leave alive.
Madam Zhang was an interesting new character, a woman who wanted power but in contrast to Zhu leaned into the her assigned gender role, trying to gain power through her husband and her lover. And it goes wrong in multiple ways: first she's exposed and beaten and demoted, her lover (who she denies having had actual feelings for) killed; and then when she kills her husband and finds a new ally and actually becomes empress, she finds out that even in the position she sought she's still almost completely dependent on her husband. Zhu throwing that in her face at the end was very fitting.
Zhu herself is completely set on her path - until there's the real, immediate risk of losing Xu Da. Xu Da dies four times for Zhu in this book alone, three times by drowning. Zhu drowned her own army to get past a line of hungry ghosts – and it worked! Whoa. Fortunately she didn't end up having to make the decision, saving herself some guilt later on.
I liked Ma's role telling Zhu that there's a reason Ma decided to support her: because Zhu promises to make the world better, something Zhu appeared to have forgotten about. And yet people believe in her so much that her second in command cuts off his own arm so he can be mistaken for her and executed in her stead so she has time to execute her own plans.
Ma has a different kind of female-coded, passive power, one that's also apparent in her interactions with Baoxiang, and especially pointed when she becomes pregnant and Baoxiang explicitly says he'd forgotten he could create things. (How convenient, I thought, that solves the problem of how Zhu and Ma will get an heir…)
I didn't expect the undercover plot at all and wasn't entirely sure how to feel about it at first, but it led to so many great scenes that I ended up enjoying it a lot. I was surprised Zhu decided against killing Baoxiang; though her reasoning was plausible, and the danger of betrayal isn't that great especially because Baoxiang wasn't exactly loved either and he doesn't have the Mandate anymore ,e. Though I was glad Baoxiang also got his crushing defeat, and especially finding out that Esen's ghost wasn't real. In contrast, I'm glad Zhu at least got some sense of closure with Ouyang's ghost.
Overall a rather dark book, not a lot of gore but still very brutal in different ways, but it's very good and I thought the endings were satisfying.
I read "She Who Became the Sun" by Shelley Parker-Chan 3.5 years ago and liked it a lot (review), but when the sequel finally came out and was available at the library it landed somewhere in the big pile of "books I want to read but don't have the time for right now and/or it doesn't seem like the right moment mood-wise from what I anticipate the book to be like" – near the top of that list but it's a long list.
Then on my first date with L she mentioned that she liked listening to audiobooks because she also never has enough time to read all the books but she has slightly more time to listen to audiobooks, and that made sense to me so I checked which audiobooks were available at the library, and He Who Drowned the World was, so I decided to try it out. And only then did I find out that it's one of her favorite books, bonus. (She's reading the Steerswoman books now on my recommendation and enjoying them a lot, and I enjoy getting excited live updates.)
It was the first audiobook I'd listened to in ages: usually I listen to podcasts half in the background, and with audiobooks it's more of a bother if I get distracted and miss something. That was still occasionally annoying, it's much easier to go back in a book if I miss something (easiest in a physical book.) But overall I enjoyed it: I thought the narrator, Natalie Naudus, did a good job with the voices, and getting the accurate pronounciation of the names was nice. I also read very quickly, faster than I listen, but this is a book I wouldn't have wanted to speed through anyway.
I enjoyed it a lot. It took me a bit to get into it, and I wonder if it would have been easier if I had read the first book more recently. I was initially somewhat surprised to remember to what extent this is a fairly dark series where all the main characters are terrible people in different ways; but also so fascinating that it is hard to put down.
There were four main characters this time: Zhu Yuanzhang, Ouyang, Wang Baoxiang, and Madam Zhang; and in the last part of the story there are also PoV chapters from Ma Xiuying.
Ouyang and Wang Baoxiang were so self-destructive in their desires for revenge, and Zhu so consumed by the wish to be the greatest that she seemed to forget why she wanted it; almost in contrast, Madam Zhang was "just" more "ordinary" kinds of selfish and ambitious. I really enjoyed the contrasts and similarities between the characters, and especially the way gender roles were portrayed. I loved Zhu feeling so much kinship with Ouyang, and getting to know him better and for them to become closer through her giving him pain, and him being confused why Zhu doesn't put importance in manliness but still beginning to trust Zhu so much that he's even willing to disguise himself as a women; only for him to reject and dismiss her completely once he finds out she's not a man. Of course he did, but oof.
Ouyang being so focused on his revenge that he hardly spared a thought for what his men might want to the point of walking into an ambush also fit perfectly. Yeah he got to kill the Great Khan, but it was still a defeat in the end when the appearance of his not-dead-after-all father, in whose name he'd proclaimed to seek revenge, makes him realize that it was really for nothing. Brutal move by Wang Baoxiang, who of course wanted revenge against Ouyang because of his own complicated feelings for Esen-Temur. (Tbh I'm not even sure if that really was Ouyang's father, Ouyang did think that he'd forgotten his face and Wang Baoxiang knew he only needed to make Ouyang believe for a few moments.)
Maybe one of Wang Baoxiang's most vicious moves. Wang Baoxiang deliberately uses that the court sees him as unmanly even as he resents it, he even becomes the lover of the Third Prince. But the court is in a constant power struggle, and even when the Minister of Revenue offers him a way to climb the ranks the “normal” ambitious way he opts for betrayal instead. I wasn't surprised that it was him who organized the posters accusing Madam Zhang of adultery, but I was very surprised by their marriage! What a scheme. He allies with Lady Ki to protect her son and with that his own position as his lover, but it goes wrong because the Empress was lying too and the Third Prince dies. I should have expected it but it was still brutal when/how it happened. No wonder Lady Ki wanted revenge after, the surprise was more that she was allowed to leave alive.
Madam Zhang was an interesting new character, a woman who wanted power but in contrast to Zhu leaned into the her assigned gender role, trying to gain power through her husband and her lover. And it goes wrong in multiple ways: first she's exposed and beaten and demoted, her lover (who she denies having had actual feelings for) killed; and then when she kills her husband and finds a new ally and actually becomes empress, she finds out that even in the position she sought she's still almost completely dependent on her husband. Zhu throwing that in her face at the end was very fitting.
Zhu herself is completely set on her path - until there's the real, immediate risk of losing Xu Da. Xu Da dies four times for Zhu in this book alone, three times by drowning. Zhu drowned her own army to get past a line of hungry ghosts – and it worked! Whoa. Fortunately she didn't end up having to make the decision, saving herself some guilt later on.
I liked Ma's role telling Zhu that there's a reason Ma decided to support her: because Zhu promises to make the world better, something Zhu appeared to have forgotten about. And yet people believe in her so much that her second in command cuts off his own arm so he can be mistaken for her and executed in her stead so she has time to execute her own plans.
Ma has a different kind of female-coded, passive power, one that's also apparent in her interactions with Baoxiang, and especially pointed when she becomes pregnant and Baoxiang explicitly says he'd forgotten he could create things. (How convenient, I thought, that solves the problem of how Zhu and Ma will get an heir…)
I didn't expect the undercover plot at all and wasn't entirely sure how to feel about it at first, but it led to so many great scenes that I ended up enjoying it a lot. I was surprised Zhu decided against killing Baoxiang; though her reasoning was plausible, and the danger of betrayal isn't that great especially because Baoxiang wasn't exactly loved either and he doesn't have the Mandate anymore ,e. Though I was glad Baoxiang also got his crushing defeat, and especially finding out that Esen's ghost wasn't real. In contrast, I'm glad Zhu at least got some sense of closure with Ouyang's ghost.
Overall a rather dark book, not a lot of gore but still very brutal in different ways, but it's very good and I thought the endings were satisfying.
