There is no way out of her little town for Rin, unless she passes the fiendishly exhaustive Keju exam. If she fails the exam, she will have to marry a man decades older than she. If she can pass the exam, as Rin believes at the beginning of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War, she has it made. Her future will be assured and she will no longer have to work for people she hates or marry who they choose. Little does Rin know, but Keju is just the beginning of her struggles.
Against all expectations (except her own), Rin passes the Keju. Passing this test, modeled on China’s imperial examination, earns Rin a place at the Sinegard, a renowned military academy in the capitol. Students who do well at the Sinegard are almost guaranteed to do will professionally. What Rin finds at the academy, however, is prejudice and high standards—so high that there’s a good chance she’ll flunk out.
The Poppy War follows Rin through her school years to the day when, the Federation of Mugen invades and the entire school is immediately drafted into the military. Even Rin, who has pledged to study the obscure and frequently bizarre field of Lore, is sent out to fight. Rin gets sent to serve with the weirdest unit in the army because of this. That unit, led by a previous star pupil at the Sinegard, has a lot of strange abilities and a very bad reputation. No one else thinks they’re capable of much, but that star pupil manages to land Rin and the rest of the unit right smack into the middle of the war.
There’s a lot of plot in The Poppy War, but that plot is a vehicle for Rin’s slow discoveries about her heritage and strange abilities. At the beginning of the book, Rin is a firm patriot. The problem is that she’s the kind of patriot who has never really thought about the horrible things her country has done to stay independent. By the end of the book, it seems like Rin is fighting a completely different fight: one with her conscience about whether or not there are prices that are too high to pay.
I was completely hooked by The Poppy War. I love the Chinese-inspired setting and Kuang’s willingness to raise the stakes for the characters. No one is safe in this book. I’m really looking forward to the next book in the series, partly because of the setting and the ethical wrangling, but also because the ending completely changed the game for Rin and her few surviving allies.