"First off, this is NOT a duology. This book ends with a cliffhanger and the publisher lists this book on Edelweiss that it is part of a trilogy. When I picked this audiobook up for early review, there was no marketing anywhere to readers to indicate this was an incomplete series and still had (at least) another book to go.

The review WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS so if you’d rather read no spoilers at all, please stop now and don’t read this review. I think there will be an audience for this book, but I am not one of them and I will go into why in this review.

This was a highly anticipated release for me. I loved Iron Widow when I first read it, and even though I have read 200 or so odd books since then, I re-read the first book before starting this one and I still think that is a very solid book that I thoroughly enjoyed. This book though? I hated it.

I wouldn’t say you need to reread the first book before reading this book if you’re here for the polyam romance with Wu Zetian, Gao Yizhi, and Li Shimin. In fact, if you're here for the romance, you might want to go ahead and bow out now. Your faves are NOT going to be in this book in any meaningful way the entire book. One love interest only appears in dreams and at the very, very end. The other love interest is basically a background character and Zetian doesn't even get to hold hands with him. They have to meet in secret and they literally can't even hug one another. We do find out more about Yizhi’s backstory which was interesting (and depressing) for all of a few minutes. Didn’t really dive too deep into it with this book. The marketing for the first book heavily leaned on the polyam romance and I expected that same dynamic here? Well, forget it.

There is a new guy, the emperor who has been frozen in slumber for 221 years, Qin Zheng. And I'll go into him more further down in the review, but even he takes a backseat to this story even though he's supposed to be emperor with Zetian at his side. He had potential as a new morally grey/dark romance love interest with all toxicity that implies, but he gets shoved to the sideline for much of this book. So even for a romantic/entertainment aspect, he’s a disappointment.

Zetian still has that fire of feminine rage about her and wanting to do better for her people and other women in Huaxia, but at what cost? By the end of this book, I was questioning if I'm supposed to feel bad for her or if I'm supposed to wish for her downfall...because her governmental policies she enacts with Qin Zheng has people living in fear, turning on their friends and neighbors, and people getting brutally executed on the daily. It certainly has me questioning if this is supposed to be a villain origin story?

Content notes included at the beginning of the audiobook include violence, abuse, body horror, mass murder, toxic relationship dynamics, discussions of reproductive cohesion, allusion to childhood sexual abuse, and references to miscarriage, domestic violence, sexual assault, and suicide.

I would add the following: disfigurement (cutting someone’s finger off and forcing prisoners into being eunuchs), medical conditions (including foot binding, stroke, and presumed medical ailments due to lack of built up immunity), magical cure for a disability, misogyny, mentions of torture (including starvation, sleep deprivation, and physical torture), a hunger strike, burning people alive, beheadings, mentions of organ harvesting from prisoners, forced sex work, and impregnating a surrogate.

This book picks up right after the ending of Iron Widow. Qin Zheng narrates the prologue and recaps the moments right before he got put into his frozen state, and what he experiences right after he wakes up. This was the best part of the whole book. It's a shame this book isn't dual narrated and Qin Zheng only narrates the prologue and epilogue. But seeing as how this book is already almost double in size from the first book, maybe we didn't need it dual narrated.

I did wonder just HOW the government was meant to function since the ending of the previous book had Zetian basically murdering almost everyone of note (including her own family). I'm not sure how well the author planned this out because this is where the story absolutely flounders to find its footing. Zetian is 18 with no formal education and makes decisions on a whim. She is not a planner. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing until you realize she means to rule.

Qin Zheng balances this out (if only barely) since he was previously Emperor himself and quickly takes control of the situation and sets up shop while Zetian is recovering from the events at the end of the previous book. But in the end, Qin Zheng is only in his 20s (by Zetian's estimate, I don't think we get an exact age) and his policies, while noble, is more idealistic rather than realistic.

This book is like a polisci class that I did not voluntarily sign up for. It dives into philosophical commentary that lasts way too long. It’s very heavy handed. If you love a study into what can create instability in an economy, this might be the story for you? This book is a VAST tone shift from the first book, as the author has admitted on social media. You want fighting mecha/Chrysalis battles? Forget it. This is a book on policies and how to run a government (or rather, how to fail running a government).

Sure, you can enact policies to better the lives of women, introduce healthcare, tell people to strike up against the wealthy, enable a way so everyone earns the same, but as we see in this book, this starts leading to revolutions against Zetian and Qin Zheng if the implantation is too much, too fast. I think they have idealistic views on how to make the country better, but their way of doing things has lead to anyone who doesn't agree with them (or even SUSPECTED of not agreeing with them) to public beheadings, imprisonment, or being brutally beaten to death. Did they accidentally create Communism? If anything, this book is showing the feminine rage to dictatorship pipeline can be a slippery slope. Is that the lesson I'm supposed to be taking from this?

Zetian is still the main character and the book is still primarily from her POV. However, this world is still a very patriarchal one and Qin Zheng has taken power from her with almost no fight at all. Even when Qin Zheng is quarantined for his own good, he‘s still the one everyone listens to without question. At best, you could say people are wary of Zetian because she’s still an unknown entity to the public and that’s why they don’t trust her but still. They only know about Qin Zheng from history books and legends, and apparently that’s enough.

I should note that one interesting thing this book questions is whether someone who has been in stasis for over two hundred years can truly be immune from viruses the rest of society had all those years to overcome. It winds up not being nearly as interesting as I wanted though because the whole thing becomes a moot point and all it does is sideline Qin Zheng to a single room for most of the book when he could’ve been out and about instead. So, an idea was had, but like many ideas in this book, it falls short.

We should talk about the disability rep in this book. All throughout the first book, we see Zetian adapt to her bound feet, whether it’s walking with a cane or with a wheelchair. That’s not something we usually see in fantasy books and it was good to see that rep. This book seems to want to do away with Zetian’s disability? Like a magical cure, she’s given surgery she never asked for sometime between the end of the first book and the beginning of this one while she’s out unconscious that’ll magically fix her feet. She is in recovery for the whole of this book so correct me if I’m wrong. Her feet are…fine now at the end?

I do think the bound feet situation from Chinese history is a tricky one to tackle because there are plenty of women who never looked favorably about it but were forced into it (and by the time my grandmother was born, it had fallen out of favor so I never did know anyone who looked at it favorably among my own living Chinese relatives). Zetian always looked at her bound feet with disdain anyways but is a magical surgery to suddenly fix things the solution for this series? I wasn’t expecting this plotline at all and now all I’ve done is side-eye the way her disability is handled.

We should talk too about the way the story forces disabilities on prisoners by making them eunuchs, only for said prisoners to die anyways with little fanfare? It’s yet another example of mindless violence Zetian and Qin Zheng partake in and there’s zero remorse or reflection why this is a terrible thing for them to do. The reasoning behind this plot is that Zetian needs a second pilot and while Qin Zheng is in quarantine, he approves of her getting a second pilot (the power indifference in the seats have been fixed at this point) but only from the prisons and only if the male prisoners chosen are made into eunuchs. For all the talk about female empowerment, I don’t know why it was never even a thought to get a fellow female pilot to power the Chrysalis with Zetian. Maybe I missed it on audio, but I don’t remember anyone even questioning Qin Zheng’s decision. And Zetian couldn’t care less what happened to the male prisoners.

There are more female characters who Zetian interact with in this book, but it’s very surface level. There’s not much depth to any of the other female characters. A new character is introduced as Zetian’s maid servant and she has revolutionary ideals and is allegedly very smart (all we see is that she can read and tests very highly on an exam. Her actions throughout this book don’t actually prove to me she’s very smart at all though. It seems she has more of a death wish). Then we have one of the fellow pilots from the first book who antagonized Zetian but started to be friendly with her this book. But she didn’t really bring much to the table either. Forgettable is one way of describing her here.

The author had commissioned artwork of two new pilots, one 13 and another 14, for this book who I thought would have greater significance, but no. There was no point to them at all.

Characters who I did like from the first book - Shimin and Yizhi are missing for most of the book. Zetian barely even has a minute to talk to Yizhi and Shimin is physically MIA until the very end. From the start, I thought this was a polyam SFF romance series and I feel misled. The characters we know and love get shoved aside for Qin Zheng, who isn’t even a new endgame love interest (unless he somehow changes his tune significantly and gets added to the polyam group by the end of the series. But I have my doubts). Zetian DOES have sex with Qin Zheng. So, if you’re not a fan of the main character having sex with someone outside their polycule, this one might not be for you. The story tried to make this a female empowerment thing where Zetian only sleeps with him to get what she wants, but it’s badly done in my opinion.

This book starts to hint at Zetian and Qin Zheng both experiencing their own forms of PTSD, but it never delves deeper into the situation. Zetian is haunted by her decisions of mass murder that include killing her family. Qin Zheng still has to live with the fact that he seemingly fell asleep one minute and woke up the next where everyone he once knew is now long dead and everything he’s ever known has changed. I wish rather than diving into all the politics, we could’ve focused more internally instead.

Should we talk about the forced pregnancy storyline? Or rather, Zetian was an unwilling participant where she thought Yizhi got her eggs from her without her knowledge and, with Qin Zheng’s sperm, impregnated another lady as their surrogate to continue their supposed line. And all the while, Zetian is forced to pretend she’s pregnant to mollify the masses who can accept her as a wife and a mother but not a fighter inside a Chrysalis. Zetian thinking Yizhi betrayed her was such a bad moment in the book. Like the situation turns out FINE but if there was ever a situation that would make me DNF, that would’ve been my last straw (but I am stubborn and wanted to listen to this book to the bitter end).

Even besides the more detailed sex scenes, this book now reads more like adult SFF than YA overall. The way this book is written is more akin to The Radiant Emperor duology, an adult series, than a YA one in terms of plot (slow as it is) and writing style. I love reading both YA and adult books but I think with the older love interest (as it were) and style of this book, I would recommend this more for NA crossover and adult fantasy readers.

Much like He Who Drowned the World, I highly disliked that book while many, many readers seemed to like it. I think it’ll be a similar case here. I hated this book and reading this sequel ruined the experience of the first book for me. I do tend to focus more on the romance aspect when the overall plot can’t hold my attention and to be honest, nothing in this book is worth 21 HOURS on audio.

This is significantly longer than the 12 hour audiobook from book one and I don’t know what we have to show for it. The romance with our fave guys from book one are missing from Zetian’s life and she’s gone off with a new man while failing to outsmart him. The country they’re leading is in revolt and they’ve tortured and killed so many people in an effort to stay in power.

There’s nothing to like about Zetian or Qin Zheng. The ending of the book is a shocker and one that is meant to be a cliffhanger but I can’t even be bothered. We learn the “truth� behind the Hunduns and there’s a side plot that’s wholly unnecessary about flying into space to speak to the “Gods� that dragged out for far too long and the things we do discover is too into left field for me personally.

The audiobook is narrated primarily by Rong Fu and I would say for the most part, it’s good. I did hear at the end that this is produced by a Canadian team and maybe that’s where the difference lies because the way the narrator pronounces the word “dais� drove me up a wall and I was hoping it was the absolute last time Zetian and Qin Zheng had to step on one. There’s apparently an American pronunciation for it that I’m used to as “DAY-us� vs the British one this audiobook uses that’s “DIE-us�. Drove me batty.

Other than that, the audiobook was good. Derek Kwan didn’t have enough parts to narrate. He only showed up for the prologue and epilogue as Qin Zheng. I almost wish Qin Zheng had more POV chapters so we could have more narrated by him. It’s a shame this wasn’t recorded in duet otherwise, but it is what it is. I winded up speeding up this audiobook from my usual 1.7x speed to 3x speed (which I don’t normally do) but I still found the narration listenable and it did help me get through a significant portion of the boring philosophical chapters.

The three year wait for this book wasn’t worth it to me. I even wound up canceling my Illumicrate preorder for the newly designed two book set. Who even knows when the third book will be out, but I don’t see myself bothering to read it at this point.

If you read this second book and loved it, then I love that for you. This just happens to be my most disappointing read of the year, and what a book to end 2024 on.

***Thanks to Libro.fm for offering this ALC up for review***"