At the end of The Dragon Republic, Rin loses her left hand. However, I found myself frustrated by the depictions of disability in this book.

The Burning God shows that Kuang is a master of raising the stakes. The costs are massive and they hurt, especially when those actions make the path to victory so much narrower. It also (rightfully) depicts missionaries and the acts of white supremacists as violent, no matter whether the violence is done by medical testing, building churches where there were none before, or the act of placing whiteness as a center in a place where it never was before. Every moment that the Hesperian’s spend on the page, every moment that we see how strange and different the Empire is from Nikara, reinforces how not all cultures are the same. Where I find Kuang is strongest is in how she deals with the descriptions of the magic, and how she handles colonialism. Kuang renders that hunger in ways that I found very effective. Rin makes not just painful choices, choices which any leader has to make, but she makes selfish choices in order to pursue the vengeance that she seeks on her own behalf, and it can be almost painful to watch as she decides how to deal with her past and the people who care about her in the ultimate quest for power. How power shapes her is important, but truthfully it is how her power and her thirst for it shapes the choices that she makes for everyone else that is the core of the story in this third installment. Rin has been described as an antihero, and it’s no different in this final chapter. The Poppy War Trilogy is the story of Fang Runin’s rise from obscurity to power, and how she claws her way to the top using any means possible. Kuang does it beautifully in The Burning God. Sticking the landing of an acclaimed trilogy that has garnered multiple nominations in its field? Yeah, that’s even more difficult, and R.F.

The burning god kuang