Strong start to a YA fantasy world, loosely based on Chinese mythology/ folklore. There was some repetition in parts, as noted by other reviewers. But I enjoyed the story overall.

The conclusion definitely sets up for book #2 (I see there is already a book #3 listed)! Recommend for ages 12+. I didn’t see anything alarming for younger readers, but teens are more likely to appreciate the political war strategies. Thanks to NetGalley and publishers for the advanced reader’s copy!

I will first like to thank NetGalley and the Publisher for the free arc in exchange for an honest review.
I was super excited to read this book but was ultimately let down for a multitude of reasons. Even though this book is marketed as a slow burn romance, I didn't feel that. There was a slight time skip shortly after the fmc accepted the deal and she was already showing evidence of her attraction the the mmc. Many of the moments the two were together where off page, not actual scenes. The fmc even quickly admits she is attracted to him but says they cannot be together. It was almost like the audience was told they should like the prince but where not given reasons why they should like him and Ruying together. So even though it took until towards the end for the two characters to even kiss one another, with the lack of romance building in the novel it made the attraction seem fast pace instead of slow-burn. Also he is a colonizer. There is no defending that. He is not morally gray, he's just a bad guy. I didn't care for most of the characters in this book since they were very irritating. This book needed major editing done. I understand arcs go through more editing before being published, but this was the worst I seen. The ending felt like it could open up the possibility of a love triangle in the second book, which I wont mad if she ended up with a non-colonizer.

I had some pretty mixed feelings about this book. Starting with the good I loved the overall plot. The whole idea of tech vs magic was really interesting to watch play out. I also enjoyed the second half of the book WAY more than the first half. Moving more towards the bad the first half of the book was very internal monologue heavy making it rather hard to follow and a little boring in places. I think this was another reason for enjoying the second half more as the action was much better. The pacing also felt kind of off. I understood the need for the time jump but it felt rather disjointed in execution. Then finally I have a lot of problems with both of the main characters. As I already said I loved the plot and I think that overall carried this story. I felt that Ruy was a rather flat character over all and the love story that plays out did not have enough real meat to it to get the reader super engaged in it.

This book was a struggle to get through. I felt like nothing happened for the majority of the book. It was just Ruying going back and forth in her head about whether she was good or evil; if she was doing the right thing or not. It was exhausting.

While I hated that Ruying basically falls in love with Anthony, I suppose it would be possible. There is such a thing as Stockholm Syndrome. But I honestly never cared about the characters. I don’t know how to explain it but I just felt the writing style kept me disconnected from them. I also thought the one chapter from Anthony’s pov was a strange choice.

I found the magic system interesting even though we didn’t get to see much of it. The world building, I felt was a little lacking. I enjoyed the few references to their gods though. We really don’t learn anything about the world the Romans came from except that it is <spoiler>dying<\spoiler>. We don’t know if it’s our world or some other made up world, although it does seem similar to our future, except for the whole Romans no longer existing thing. We don’t find out how the Romans created a portal between worlds, except that it’s science.

What bothered me the most with this book was the lack of an ending. It just seemed to stop, like if you want to know how it really ends, you have to read the next book. And I don’t like when the power dynamics are so extreme. How is there any way that the Pangu will ever win against the Romans? I thought Ruying was actually being practical when she justified her actions in that she was stopping an apocalypse and the end of her people. I just see no solution where the Pangu would even come close to beating the Romans without some kind of outside help or magical intervention. It just seemed really unrealistic.

From the cover and the description, I really thought I was going to like this book, but it just wasn’t for me.

***Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-ARC of this book. All opinions expressed within are my own***

I am in the worst book slump of my life and haven’t been in the mood to read it. But this book is right up my alley. And I follow the author on TikTok. I have been reading a lot of Chinese mythology lately which I’m pretty sure this book is. So I know I’ll love it. I read a few pages and was intrigued. I definitely say give it a shot if you like Chinese mythology and pretty covers. Can’t wait to purchase a physical copy of this book and have it in my collection

This was such a fun read I loved it so much I couldn't put it down and was completely hooked from the first page

This book gives a glimpse into colonization and oppression in a subtle way.

To be honest, reading this book is like tasting citrus. Beautiful but sometimes sour and bitter. Especially when reflecting on what is really happening in the world these days.

Colonization is the main issue brought up by the main character, Ruying. I was taken to dive into the miserable life of Ruying and her sister in the midst of massive oppression from other countries.

The use of illegal drugs, house demolishing, land taken, several liberation restrictions on indigenous people, and groups opposing colonization, are the main issues of this book.

I like the layered conflict, but I don't like how Ruying says it over and over again in every chapter. What I mean is, I understand her suffering and all, but since it was a fictional book, limited by wordcount and pages, I wanted to see the plot progress in a real way. Real action. Not just some rambling from a girl literally like every chapter.

And the romance. don't hate me, but I don't feel the romance in this book was necessary. Especially a love triangle. This book has enough problems already, and I don't see any room for the romance to develop.

Nonetheless, I still hope the next book can surprise me.

I received this arc from Netgalley in exchange for honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this ARC.

I really wanted to love this one, but I ended up having mixed feelings about it. I'll start with the things that I did like. I liked how this was a blend of sci-fi and fantasy. I appreciated how this gave us a look at the effects colonialism has on those who are colonized. I also appreciated how the characters were morally gray. I thought that Baihu was the best example of morally gray character in this book. I'm interested to see more of him the sequel.

On to the things that I wasn't a fan of or thought could use some improvement. I thought that the worldbuilding was underdeveloped. The lack of worldbuilding led me to be confused about a few things as I was reading, especially when it came to the Romans. I thought that this world was interesting, but I would have liked to seen it fleshed out a bit more. I wasn't a fan of the romance between Antony and Ruying at all. I didn't like how she was developing feelings for her colonizer. It just felt icky to me considering how much Ruying talks about how much she hates the Romans for what they've done to her world. I also found Ruying to be slightly annoying at points along with being self-righteous.

Overall, even though I had my issues with this book, I'm interested enough to see what happens in the sequel. I was just really wanting more from this book, especially with a cover as gorgeous as this one.

First of all, I want to thank Netgalley and Random House for providing me with a copy of the book.

I was really excited to read this book. I have been loving books with intricate politics and court dynamics, and I was looking forward to reading from the perspective of a court assassin.

However, this book was challenging to get through. The beginning felt bogged down because there was a lot of info-dumping, all of which was happening between lines of a conversation. From there, the plot took off and it was exciting to read about the dynamics of Ruying's family, and the lead-up to Ruying being hired as Antony's assassin was exciting. I was really engaged until about half-way through the story as the romance started to become more prevalent.

It also took quite a bit of time to wrap my head around the concept of Rome being the invader's homeworld. I was excited to read about fantasy-Manchuria, and I understand that in this book, Rome is a fantasy-version of a country our world. However, it felt like a strange choice to have a fantasy world based on a country and its history, but also include Rome from Earth. I appreciate the author breaking the mold, but it was also a choice that broke immersion and still feels strange after finishing the book.

I will also say the romance between Ruying and Antony was extremely off-putting. I think that if Ruying's attraction towards him was spun more as a survival mechanism, it would be more understandable, but it just felt very unbelievable and unpalatable that Ruying would feel anything other than disgust and revulsion towards Antony. This romance also starts to develop after he forces her against her will to commit horrors, which honestly felt gross and made me put the book down for a while.

By the time I hit about 50% of the way through the book, I realized that I wasn't invested in seeing how anything really resolved. I found a lot of the characters unlikeable and the setting was confusing. I will say that I liked the ending a lot, and I'm interested to see how the author ends up resolving everything. I'm just not sure that I'll want to invest the energy into the rest of the series.

There was a woman who grew up hearing whispered stories of Nanking when the Japanese invaded & the atrocities they committed against civilians of that area. Her name was Iris Chang & she wrote a book called The Rape of Nanking. The forward of this book brings her to mind. But here is a tapestry woven of history, perseverance, beauty & hope. This is how a people rewove the atrocities that happened to them in a horror fantasy fairy tale. The rape of Manchuria under the Russians & Japanese was a holocaust that has barely been acknowledged because it is not politically accepted as comfortable, the same of Nanking.
What do you do to survive under the most impossible of situations with the tyrants of an invasion occupation? What to do to try and keep yourself & loved ones alive if never safe? How far are you willing to go when you can't get out from under the heel of never ending abuse, hunger & death at best mercifully fast? Occupation & the arrogance of the occupier's. I never will forget a black & white old picture I saw in some article when young of a pair of fashionable dressed pretty French girls withh baskets of rice in a court yard, apparently in Vietnam. They were throwing the grain to Vietnamese that had probably grown & harvested it [or around those that did] to see people scrambling to pick it up, almost fighting over the minute grains that pebbled the ground to feed their families. The look of craven lack of morals shown on their faces as well as the energy of desperation of the peasants gathering the kernels overwhelmed the senses.
Ruying is a girl just out of teens and we play the story through her eyes & mind. A survivor whose sister is an opium addict that she tries to keep alive through her connection with a playmate grown up that runs the main opium den & is a right hand pawn controller of the outside prince. England did well in its attempted domination of the giant Cathay using the dragon of dreams & nightmares to subvert & harness the Chinese into submission so heavily then with the invasion of others the die was already cast. A tainted would have been love story marriage to a lifelong friend due to invasion. Baihu, her former friend who now gave her opium for her addicted sister, was the illegitimate son of royalty & could be a puppet prince/king to the invaders if his legitimate cousin died. He want her to murder with magic the prince in charge of next to nothing to take his place. Some of her people havve magic in different manners and strengths but they can come at a cost to their energy taking from their very life span depending on type & amount. She has death magic or the ability to kill someone with magic which is the strongest type but it is also at a cost to herself every time she uses it. She badly choses a theft that almost costs her everything & puts her directly in front of the Princes of Rome and all that entails. A provocative read that evokes a lot of emotion. Good read

Thank you, Net Galli for this trial read. It is an amazing opening act to a larger story.

I really love the world building; I would claim two worlds were build at once. the world of Pungo and its magic system and the world of Rome. I look forward to finding out more about all of it. Molly X Chane did an amazing job, introducing us one step at a time to the current cetacean and expanding the world even peppering in some myths about the gods that I’m sure she will expand on in the next installments.

Besides the amazing world building, I love the characters. We follow initially and unwilling hero, who just wants to survive the atrocities of her world. When she’s forced to pick a side, she chooses to Hope; she does what every unwilling hero does, and chooses the easy way. I can’t wait to see what Ruying does next.

I also really like the side characters like Baihu and Anthony. I really like Baihus introduction and his further appearances in the book don’t disappoint.. I just know he will play a bigger role as the story progresses.

And it’s beautiful to discover the many layers to Anthony.

I can’t wait for the next installment. This is definitely a worthy read.

Beautiful writing style, with a fascinating introduction that expertly laid out the world, characters, and conflict. Unfortunately, I felt let down by the central romance, characters, and felt that the book didn't deliver on its premise. Ultimately, this wasn't for me.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. I didn't love the romance (it was very obvious that the love interest was a terrible person) but the prose, the worldbuilding, and the story all landed!

This Fantasy was so freaking good I couldn't not out it down for anything. I had to know what happened next. I could not get enough of it! So good! I loved this storyline, it was different and I liked that. 5 stars!
I just reviewed To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang. #ToGazeUponWickedGods #NetGalley
[NetGalley URL]

The book promises an interesting story. Unfortunately, it fails to deliver on several fronts.

First, I found the writing to be repetitive and flowery at times. There is a lot of telling not showing. In the first chapter, there is paragraph after paragraph telling us how horrible the Romans are except each new paragraph doesn't tell us anything new.

We are told multiple times about the kindness of a character or the brilliance of another. We rarely see said kindness or brilliance unless it is directed toward RuYing and often times this action has already happened and we are just being told about it.

And this leads into what I think is one of the main problems of the book - the main character. She is this interesting mix of accepting everything at face value, loving her family and being very impulsive.
This impulsivity and love are what causes the enemy prince to find her because she didn't seem to give much weight to the negative consequences if she were caught.

On the other hand, this impulsivity overrides her love for her family. When she first questions the prince's orders she doesn't think about what could happen to her, her family and her friends. And I think the author was trying to establish RuYing's morality and ethics. But RuYing has already agreed to be the prince's puppet assassin to save her family. She also doesn't know the prince well enough to question his orders. This questioning makes it feel like they are equals but they aren't. And RuYing is supposed to be aware of that but she isn't.

The prince, right now in RuYing's mind and in the story, is actively oppressing her. He is forcing her to kill. He is part of the family that started this oppression and as a result ruined RuYing's family, or sped up that ruin. I repeat, they are not equals. He shows her that the Romans can wipe her and her people out but that isn't anything she doesn't already know. She has to obey him.

As for accepting everything at face value, she buys into the prince's plans for a better world. But we are just told this had happened. And I understand that this buy-in is highly likely a defence mechanism on her part so she can sleep at night. And I believe people will do what it takes to survive. But we don't see how her distrust changes to trust.

And this is important because I feel like this buy-in is closely tied to her relationship with the prince. She has feelings for him while he is actively oppressing her. She kills because she believes in what he has told her. The change from hate to you-are-an-okay-guy happens within a flip of a page with a couple of paragraphs mentioning what has happened since. I found this very jarring and wished the author had written on how RuYing developed Stockholm Syndrome instead of skipping over it.

The romance makes me very uncomfortable. And part of me thinks the author wrote it to be this way because another character does call RuYing out on why she likes/loves the prince. However, RuYing seems to just ignore or block out this criticism.

Thank you NetGalley and RandomHouse Publishing for the advanced copy in exchange for a review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

The writing and imagery in this book was incredible and the author’s note set pretty high standards for the book to meet. Although there were some aspects of the story that I didn’t love, it was more a matter of personal taste then the author’s craft. It’ll be interesting to see how the story plays out throughout the series.

DNF - READ ONLY ABOUT 20%

First of all, thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me an arc! The title and premise of the book seemed fascinating, and I was glad I got to take a look at it.

I want to preface this review by saying I very rarely do not finish books. Even if I really am struggling to make it through a book, I still try to skim my way through it to see what it ends up being like and then evaluating whether I should give it a chance again. However, I am sorry to say I could not finish this book due to two primary factors:

1. colonizer-protagonist romance
2. heavy exposition and under-developed protagonist

Again, please take my words with (many) grains of salt because I understand that I did not actually finish the whole book. However, I was already struggling a lot in the beginning of the book with the way that the writing basically info-dumps the background, the lack of depth to the thoughts and emotions of the characters, and too little nuance in regards to colonialist themes.

First, I think there is so much to explore in regards to themes of imperialism/rising against oppression in SFF books (note: Legendborn, Red Rising, A Memory called Empire, Babel). Some of those are adult, while others are YA, but my point is that I wish there was more worldbuilding that sets up the history, wars, dynamics/tensions between oppressor and oppressed, etc. Most of the information was put in long chunks of text at the beginning of the book, and there was barely any elaboration beyond that in the next few chapters. Maybe this changes in the latter half of the book, but the geopolitical situation just felt very badly explored.

Second, there is a lack of depth to the characters' emotions and thoughts: the characters feel extremely one-dimensional. A character with a power of death would be very cool, yet it feels like there's a lack of depth to Ruying's feelings regarding her own powers. She falls into the trope of the "can kill but don't want to be evil" protagonist, but there's no crucial moments in her character arc that move the plot along. This also connects to my biggest issue with the book and reason why I couldn't finish the book. The beginning hints of attraction she feels towards her childhood friend (who is now part of the imperial regime) already turned me off so much (threatening her family isn't cute! protecting someone isn't done using power!) But I could not stand the beginning of the development of attraction between her and the prince, who is literally verbally abusive towards her (and she still likes him regardless?) As the pages continued, I couldn't help but check out some of the other Goodread reviews to find that it would be the primary romance. Especially in a book that is supposed to be about imperialism and colonialism, being attracted to someone who is crucial to the oppressive regime left such a bad taste in my mouth. For me, I think I just have higher-than-normal standards for romance in fantasy books. I could not continue reading.

This was very very harsh but I genuinely want to say that I think the premise of the book is really cool, and there is definitely so much potential present. I just think giving more depth to the characters and also making the romance more...healthy(?)...would make me like this book way more!

can we just appreciate how gorgeous the cover is?

to gaze upon wicked gods follows ruying, a morally grey character with the “chosen one” trope, fighting for her country and falling in love with…. her colonizer? yeah, that was horrible (unnecessary even).

if i were to ignore the shoddy romance, there were still elements of the story that could be improved. the juvenile writing. the questionable choices of the main character. the worldbuilding was lacking information essential to the plot and the pacing was definitely unstable. however, debut novel aside, i found this story to be somewhat memorable for the fantasy aspects. who knows, maybe i just miss reading the poppy war.

This review was made possible via an ARC through NetGalley.

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X Chang is an exploration of science vs magic in a backdrop of colonization and romance. I really liked the explanation of the magic system and how Ruying’s power over death manifests. The colored ribbons are very cool.

I respect the author for the use of hanzi in the book for traditional Chinese concepts and then explaining or translating it instead of writing the words out with the alphabet. It adds an authentic touch to the book that plays well with the fact that Antony, the love interest, is a Roman who is later stated to speak almost exclusively to Ruying in his language rather than hers. Seeing her language be used as it would be written is political, both in and outside of the work itself.

There were a lot of turns of phrase that I really enjoyed and I appreciated the use of the Opium War, a very real time in the history of China and the UK’s relationship, that didn’t shy away from addiction or the negative effects that the War had on port cities on Chinese citizens.

The pacing felt a little off to me as we didn’t properly meet Antony until the 40% mark and I wish that we had gotten to see more of Ruying’s magic in action.

I would recommend this to readers who are looking for fantasies that explore actual historical events in a fantasy context. I would not recommend this to readers who are firmly uninterested in romances involving someone who is colonized with a family member of their colonizer.

The writing was so brilliant and detailed, I had so much fun reading this book! I felt that the book had a really nuanced description of the realities of colonization, and the desperation that drives colonized people to view the colonizers as either saviours or enemies - the MC Ruying herself goes through this whole range of thoughts and emotions (most of which felt uncomfortable and uneasy, which I'm guessing is what the author intended for us to feel?). This book pretty much puts Ruying through a gruelling emotional journey (her origin story!), and I'm very keen to say how this story ends! Can't wait for the next book!

TWs - colonization, genocide and senseless violence by colonizers, death and murder on page, heavy violence on page, gun violence, drug addiction on page (not the MC), physical and verbal domestic abuse (past)

-- ty to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for an advanced copy!