The Poet Empress

by Shen Tao

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 388
Rating:

Synopsis:

In the waning years of the Azalea Dynasty, the emperor is dying, the land consumed by famine, and poetry magic lost to all except the powerful.

Wei Yin is desperate. After the fifth death of a sibling, with her family and village on the brink of starvation, she will do anything to save those she loves.

Even offer herself as concubine to the cruel heir of the beautiful and brutal Azalea House.

But in a twist of fate, the palace stands on the knife-edge of civil war with Wei trapped in its center...at the side of a violent prince.

To survive, Wei must harden her heart, rely on her wit, and become dangerous herself. Even if it means becoming a poet in a world where women are forbidden to read—and composing the most powerful spell of all. A ballad of death... and love.

I was a bit wary going into Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress because I’d heard all about how heavy the story was — abuse, violence, sexual assault of a child, torture, more violence… and it’s true, that’s a huge part of this story. I would say that it’s never gratuitous: even when the characters are indulging in gratuitous violence, the details and information we get about it are for a purpose, giving us insights into characters… and sometimes, leading us astray.

Besides that, despite the heaviness of the topic, the chapter length and narration kept things rolling for me pretty briskly, and there was pretty much no point at which I got “stuck” not wanting to proceed because things were too awful.

The thing with this story is that you think it’s going in a certain direction, and it… sort of does, but it also doesn’t, and I don’t want to spoiler too much about that. The way it builds the characters and slowly reveals their history, misdirecting and remisdirecting — I thought it was really well done, because even the ending didn’t quite fall out the way I’d found myself kind of expecting.

I guess that the thing I really found myself wanting to know partway through, that might’ve made the difference to continuing reading, is whether it was going to turn out to be a story in which the female protagonist gets swept off her feet by a violent, awful protagonist, and then it turns out he’s actually a sweet little cinnamon roll. The answer — look away if you don’t want it and want to find out for yourself — is “only kind of”. There are reasons people are the way they are, but it doesn’t excuse their actions, to the reader or to the other participants in the story.

Overall, it ended up more subtle than I’d expected, and also way more readable. I can understand people who don’t stick with it, because wow, some scenes are a lot, and pretty much none of the prominent characters are great people. And some reviewers scare me with their apologism for the actions of a particular character: trauma is not an excuse, folks! It really isn’t!

Rating: 5/5 (“loved it”)