Foul Heart Huntsman by Chloe GongMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This one goes out to all the people hopping on a ton of Chloe Gong hate bandwagons these last several years:
Sit there in your wrongness and be wrong and get used to it.
Yes, still.
"without the monster, there is no madness. without the madness, he goes out of business."
These Violent Delights
"nothing was ever as simple as 'my people' or 'your people...'"
Our Violent Ends
"don’t upset me in the future and it will be swell, i suppose.'"
Foul Lady Fortune
"the easiest way to disappear was to never disappear fully...'"
Foul Heart Huntsman
Just like I suspected when Foul Lady Fortune was announced, Chloe Gong has decided to take the concept of the YA duology to its logical conclusion with a duology of duologies. And while I still consider duologies to be one of the most annoying trends in YA these days, I have to take my hat off to Gong for doubling down on the idea in a way that no one else has done to date, not even the vaunted Marie Lu, one of the biggest duology writers out there.
Not unlike The Art of Destiny which preceded this book on my reading list, this conclusion to Gong's Secret Shanghai alternate history is a 3.5 rounded up to a 4. (I'm sorry to say that Gong really has overextended herself a bit too much this year, especially when this book came along only three months after her messy and not very acclaimed adult debut Immortal Longings.) But while this book stops short of really delving into the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War by about five years (let's be real, R.F. Kuang tackled that subject pretty well in The Poppy War), Gong still combines her meticulous historical research and international intrigue with a touch of pre-computerized supernatural scariness like so few writers in the business, and for that, she still gets all my respect.
To the world of Secret Shanghai, I now declare ave atque vale.
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