Book Review: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Book #314 of 2021:

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (The Radiant Emperor #1)

This incredible debut is a queer fantasy retelling of the founding of China’s Ming Dynasty, in which a penniless 14th-century monk-turned-rebel helped topple the Yuan Mongol rulers and forged a new empire with himself at the head. Only in this version, that figure begins life as a nameless starving peasant girl, abused by her family and told by a local fortune-teller that she has no particular destiny. Her brother, in contrast, is said to carry a shining fate, but when bandits raid their home and orphan the children, he soon dies of despair. Taking his name for her own, she enters a monastery and becomes determined to live so fully as him that even the heavens will be convinced.

Presenting as a man but always referred to in text as she/her, this protagonist is uncomfortable thinking of herself as either gender, an element of dysphoria that separates the story from that classic genre of crossdressing Mulan-type adventures where a female identity is merely temporarily hidden under armor and later revealed / restored. There is no point at which the new Zhu Chongba can go back to being a girl, even among intimates like her eventual wife who learn the truth of her body. A similar consideration extends to the novel’s other main character too, a eunuch general on the opposite side of the war who is seen as something unnatural by all. Together and apart, these two antiheroes make any number of cutthroat and cruel choices in their desperate respective quests to seize power in a world that doesn’t have a defined place for someone like them.

It’s a tale I’ve really enjoyed, although I think a few of the minor viewpoint chapters and the presence of magic in this setting are unnecessary distractions that don’t add much to the plot. (Does the heroine need to see ghosts, for instance? That ability doesn’t seem to ever matter as anything but spooky flavoring.) But it’s overall a great start to a series I’ll definitely keep reading.

[Content warning for sexism, homophobia, sexual slavery, amputation, gore, and child murder.]

★★★★☆

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