The Poppy War

“The Poppy War” opens as a familiar academy story and then abruptly becomes a war novel drawn from twentieth-century Chinese history. The world and the idea of power reached through drugs are its strengths. Some readers find the opening slow and wait a long time for action, and the tone grows much darker once the war begins. Best for readers who want fantasy with real weight rather than a light adventure.

Worth knowing The Poppy War, from 2018, was written by R. F. Kuang at nineteen and published when she was twenty-two, and it does three things in one book: a school story, in which Rin, a war orphan from a poor southern province, cheats her way into the empire’s military academy by scoring top of the entrance exam; a war, when the island Federation invades; and, in the last third, an atrocity modelled closely on the Nanjing massacre of the thirties, which is where the book stops being a fantasy with grades. The magic is shamanism, gods reached through drugs, and Rin’s god is the Phoenix. The Nikara empire is China by other names, and the trilogy, finished by The Dragon Republic in 2019 and The Burning God in 2020, follows twentieth-century Chinese history closer than most readers notice.

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