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Title: She Who Became the Sun Author: Shelley Parker-Chan Publication Date: July 2021 Publisher: Tor Books Genre: fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, queer lit

I think to sell this book as a “Mulan meets The Song of Achilles” is not only misleading, but also isn’t giving enough credit to Parker-Chan’s fascinating and rather original reimagining of Zhu Yuanzhang and the start of the Ming Dynasty. I was so taken to the political intrigue and motivations, which was brought together incredibly well by focusing on each character’s desires and their understanding of fate. The moral compass wavers quite a bit as the main characters narrate and get further consumed by their desires, putting the reader in an interesting position to work out how much these characters can be trusted in the end.

Leading me to what made this book so damn well: Zhu and Ouyang were standout characters. Zhu, being the protagonist, was one of the most well-constructed characters I’ve come across in a while. For one, to portray the first ruler of the Ming Dynasty as a genderqueer character was such a refreshing and original approach. Furthermore, Zhu’s gender identity was beautifully portrayed in a way that challenged the rigidity of the gender binary (and I would go so far as to argue the concept of the nonbinary identity). I loved how driven Zhu was by her burning desire for greatness—for better or for worse—that propelled her to where she ended up by the end of the book. As for Ouyang, I thought he was an equally memorable character. He’s an incredibly complex man who is eaten up by self-loathing and has a burning desire for vengeance, much of which is tied to him being a eunuch. Parker-Chan also does a deep dive into gender identity with Ouyang, scrutinizing the construction of masculinity in particular. At the end of the day, you could kind of call them both antiheroes in their own ways, and damn, they were well-written ones that really brought this book together.

One criticism I have of this book is that the fantasy element didn’t quite work for me. Unless I missed something, I felt that things were often left unexplained in a way that made the fantasy part of this book pointless. I’m hoping this is addressed in the second installment of this duology, but I guess we’ll find out in due time. I also found the pacing a little awkward at times, especially the middle part of the book, but not enough to frustrate me.

All-in-all, this was a fun read and well worth picking up if you want a unique reimagining of a historical moment and figure in China.

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‘Blocking traffic/public disruptions aren’t going to help your cause’ if that is so, why have there been larger and more numerous pro Palestine protests than ever before? Why is public knowledge on Palestinian oppression more prevalent now? Why do a majority of countries in the world call for a ceasefire? Why do a majority of the countries in the world call for Palestine’s recognition? And why is it that people who complain about disruptions not helping our cause have never supported us in the first place? I wonder.

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I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

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