A moment of yielding warmth that generated something infinitely tender and precious, and as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. It was nothing at all like the unrestrained, half-violent passions of the body that Xu Da had described. It felt like something new, something they’d invented themselves. Something that existed only for the two of them, in the penumbral shadow of their little room, for the span of a single kiss.
Chapter 17. Anfeng, Tenth Month
She Who Became The Sun is an intense and epic meditation on the nature of desire. The Buddhist saying – “desire is the cause of suffering because desire is the cause of rebirth” is perhaps the most applicable to our protagonist. A desire so strong that the person within is transformed body and mind into a condensed burning form of desire for greatness but also a desire to avoid nothingness.
This book is a dual point-of-view book set in a historical fantasy version of 14th century China. We get the main character, the monk Zhu Chongba and the Mongol eunuch general Ouyang. Zhu is based on the Hongwu Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang who was the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that the book’s adaptation of the setting deviates from the historical record in the best of ways.
Structurally, the book has long chapters where it switches between the two POVs. I found the book well paced and easy to follow with good character work. The book does tend to indulge in a bit of flowery poetic prose every once in a while but it was not overdone and I enjoyed the moments where it took a breath to wax poetic as otherwise the book would have been just a little bit too intense.
I enjoyed this book well enough to put the second book in the duology in my to-be-read pile for sometime in the future. Historical fantasy like this is enjoyable to me but not mind-blowingly so, I find myself craving a bit more of the weird magic systems and supernatural creature stuff. If y’all have any suggestions on that front I’m all ears.