Wow, this was unexpectedly rough going. I think we all wanted this book to be the hero that emerged from the Cait Corrain scandal, but sadly it hasn't delivered.

Since this is Book 1 of a trilogy, I want to withhold full judgement until the proper end of the story, and I will be deeply disappointed if Molly Chang is pressured into changing the trajectory of the sequels because of the backlash against the (barely existent) enemies-to-lovers "romance", which is never portrayed as a good or right thing for the heroine to pursue, and doesn't even last to the end of the book. This could have been written almost exactly the same without the romantic angle and it would have changed nothing about the story. Towards the end there is, jarringly, one single chapter written from Antony's point of view wherein he clearly has much stronger feelings and far fewer reservations about being (dubiously) "in love" with Ruying, so my best guess is that he's going to spend the next book fruitlessly pining after the heroine who has absconded with her far less compelling childhood friend, who is mostly toxic on a personal level, as opposed to being a war criminal (like Siege & Storm, lmao, the irony).

Chang is strangely determined to market this as Zutara AU fanfic, but aside from having an Asian-inspired setting and both of the main characters being young adults, Darklina is the more obvious comparison (and the scene where Antony asks Ruying to join him in overthrowing the current order of both world powers to replace them with something better is distinctly Reylo).

Chang does succeed in making her villain actually seem villainous in a number of ways that Leigh failed - the Darkling can't bring himself to kill his abusive mother for hundreds of years, even after she starts actively plotting his downfall and ruins his chance at true love, whereas this guy Antony

murdered his parents to prove himself worthy to be adopted by the Roman emperor

; attacking Genya with the nichevo'ya is usually exhibited as one of the Darkling's worst and most unforgivable crimes, but it falls flat because Genya was a soldier and trusted secret operative who shot him and deserted his army; flogging, branding and execution were standard punishments for deserters throughout real-world history, and it is confirmed in the text that execution is indeed the punishment for otkazat'sya who desert the First Army. By comparison, Antony's roughly equivalent evil deed is to

promise Ruying that her best friend Taohua (who has been captured by the Romans) will be safely released, but he nonetheless allows Taohua to be experimented on and killed in a horribly gruesome way.

Aside from the romance, I did really like Ruying's character arc so far! Her worst flaw is that she is utterly incapable of understanding or empathising with any suffering that is not happening right in front of her eyes and affecting her personally. The fact that the Roman world is apparently

on the brink of a global extinction event, and billions of people will die as a result of centuries of environmental exploitation by the ruling classes

doesn't faze her at all, and even though she is already aware at the beginning of the story that the Romans abduct and "experiment" on people, she has the gall to act shocked when

her best friend is killed in such an "experiment"

, and the fact that Antony allowed this to happen and lied to her about it is the thing which finally makes her decide that he's irredeemably evil. A heroine who is willing to relinquish her own morals and be complicit in the oppression of her own people to ensure the survival of herself and her own family felt much more realistic than YA is usually willing to be.

And make no mistake, this is YA. There seems to be some confusion about this, but I bought it from the YA shelf, and everywhere outside of the US PRH website and the author's social media labels it as YA. The characters are typical YA archetypes, albeit painted less sympathetically than usual - the impoverished girl with special secret magical powers (this is the third book I have read this year where the heroine is traumatised by having accidentally killed someone with her powers as a child); the dark prince with a tragic backstory who is a champion gaslighter, willing to do terrible things for power and (allegedly) the greater good; the childhood friend turned edgy who has been carrying a torch for the heroine his whole life, to which she remains oblivious. Although Ruying is initially less altruistic than the typical heroine, Chang gave herself an easy escape from needing to sustain this moral conflict any longer by having Ruying's grandmother, sister and friends all be part of the insurgence movement and willing to die for the cause, so once Ruying accepts this by the end of the book, the only thing she has to lose by turning against the Romans is the temporary safety afforded to her as long as she remains useful to Antony, since we are assured (over and over again) that, even if she isn't killed by his brother or the insurgents, Antony will kill her as soon as she ceases to be useful, or else she will eventually die from overusing her powers anyway.

The setting and the political/military conflict is also stock-standard YA and completely lacking in nuance so far - pre-occupation fantasy-China is mythologised as a magical, self-sustainable environmental paradise ruled by the descendants of benevolent gods (hopefully this will be debunked in the next books); the one wrinkle is the culture of patriarchy and filial piety which is starting to crack as a result of the Roman conquest. I would have liked a lot more focus on gender roles in both societies, which seems to have been intended as a secondary theme but completely failed in the execution (it never gets much further than mentioning that gender roles exist, which is not "commentary"). Meanwhile the only thing we have learned so far about the world of the Romans (which we never get to visit) is that it is dying after centuries of industrial pollution and climate change and Evil Science (which so far is the only type of science in the story).

I don't really understand why, of all the many things to criticise, there are so very, very many people complaining about the villains being called the Roman Empire (as opposed to a fantasy name) but I get the sense that Known Star Wars and AtLA Fan Molly X Chang would have just called them "the British Empire" or "the American Empire" if the publisher and the market would let her get away with it. The ancient Romans, for obvious reasons, are a soft target.

Really the premise of a magical fantasy world being invaded by a high-tech civilisation from another dimension/planet Earth has a very 20th-century vibe to it - late 70s to early 90s SFF was full to brimming with this sort of thing before Science Fiction and Fantasy were segregated into distinct genres, and I am here for that era of SFF to make a comeback.

Predictions for Book 2:
Unfortunately the ending of this first book, where

the heroine drops all pretense of co-existing with the Romans, swears revenge on Prince Antony and the Roman Empire and joins the insurgence movement with her childhood friend

, like every other YA fantasy/dystopia protagonist ever, feels extremely safe and boring. The main 'mystery' left for the next book is the youngest of the Roman princes, who has never left the Roman world and thus doesn't appear in this book at all. The only other character who is introduced but not explored is a princess from Ruying's world who has surrendered herself as a hostage to the Romans. The aspect of the setting that could turn interesting is the religion. Ruying is generally quite cynical about the myths, legends and prophecies of her world, but as the story goes on she seems to want to believe in them more (out of spite as much as anything, after Antony explains Clarke's Third Law almost verbatim), and she is particularly insistent that the royal family really are descended from the gods. The five colored stones of Nuwa (representing the five elements in real Chinese mythology) are introduced near the end as macguffins for the next book, and my prediction here is that the "gods" are going to turn out to have been invaders from yet another different dimension, and the stones are some sort of technology.
It seems inevitable that “the Phantom”, leader of the rebellion, is going to turn out to be the Blue Spirit Antony in a mask.