Powered By Rage | Iron Widow

Diving into popular books that I pick up due to the pitch, I bought Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao on my kindle because I wanted to read a psycho female lead involved in a polyamorist love triangle. Following Wu Zetian as she ravages the world that put her in a position of feeble suffering was the main draw for a lot of people. My adventure with this book was a positive one, although I do have a lot of questions.

With the main issue for Zetian being her bound feet, we can see the physical restraints that her society puts on women. Seeing her family so careless with Zetian and her sister to sell them off as war fodder in order to buy a bride for their brother, proves how the society has shaped the gender divide. Her rare hatred for men and their position of power drives her to enlist as a concubine-pilot for the man who murdered her sister.

This book is entirely character driven, the world building is extremely limited. I do wish there was more explanation of the world and everything that happens. The limited description for a lot of the sections makes the world and plot difficult to image.

Viewing this story as a Shonen anime version of a girl’s power trip is the best way to go into this book. Seeing as the main goal of the lead is to destroy the system set up to sacrifice girls for the sake of boys. Pairing up girls with lower spiritual pressure than the male pilots in a mech will only result in the girls dying in battle, there is no way around it. Overhauling this system become the goal for the entire main trio.

The first time Zetian takes matters into her own hands is when she faces Yang Guang. The man who murdered her sister outside of battle. I wish we would have learned the reason behind the murder, this is the key event that starts Zetian’s mission, yet not a lot is revealed. The mind link allows the confirmation that Yang Guang was the murderer, I think that even if it occurred in a dream later that night (like a lot of memories she got from Shimin later) that revealed some type of fight between the two that led to the murder would have had a greater impact. The murder of Yang Guang in the mech could have been something that haunts Zetian or works as a reminder of what she has done to start the journey to saving millions of girls from the piloting system, yet it seems to just be the ember to ignite the other pilots hatred her.

After being paired up with the most unhinged psycho pilot in the entire army, Zetian tries once more to murder the man in cold blood the moment she enters the yin-yang realm. Failing to kill him has her waking up in the cockpit, both of them surviving. Not being the happies camper when the top strategist demands the two work together for the sake of humanity, this is when the real plot seems to begin.

Li Shimin is portrayed as this terrible, heartless killing machine. Plucked from the labor camp he was sent to while awaiting the death sentence for the murder of his family, he lives on by the grace of his incredibly high spiritual pressure. Being kept in an underground bunker, dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit, completing the look with a muzzle, he must be dragged at gun point to every slaughter. Now, what to do with this menace of a character? How does he turn into a point of the love triangle?

He encapsulates the trope of the big brute who is actually a teddy bear. This killer murdered his brother after he sexually assaulted a girl. He is not glaring he just destroyed his eyesight while doing homework in almost absent lighting. Those scares? He needed to pay for his expensive schooling, so he fought at night. He seems like the one with a good head on his shoulders at the core of his motivations. To top off all of the suffering that is revealed to get the full scope is the memory revealing that he was never an alcoholic by choice. Being such a useful tool resulted in him getting razor blades and funnels shoved into his mouth, getting force feed bottles of booze so the corrupt leaders can better control him. This seems to be the breaking point for Zetain, her hatred gets a refueling at this new bit of information.

During their first few days of their new (forced) partnership, nothing seems to go well. Shimin and Zetian have to sync, no bond to use to become a pair. They are not a balanced match, they can use match a balanced amount of pressure between the two.

Yes, there is a sliver of hope (in a way) when the duo doesn’t kill each other and manage to transform the Vermillion Bird (a bad one, but it’s still something). Even though progress is being made, they still have a huge wall in front of them. And luckily Yizhi come along to break down that wall. The childhood crush (or at least that’s how my brain categorizes him) that is the brains of the love triangle reappears swinging. Saving Zetian from being strangled to death by a vengeful pilot, he brings the solutions (and chemistry) to the newly formed trio.

Once the detoxing starts, the bonding improves, and the trust is built, things start to go in the right direction. They might have to play extreme hide-and-seek from the armed guards, but they are able to gain enough time to avoid certain death in the next attack.

The turning point happens when the proper transformation occurs, the attempt to takeout the watchtower, and brining in Yizhi as a qi source. The triangle seems officially complete and now they can take out the tyrant government.

The ending wrapped up pretty quickly. The counterattack goes as well as you think it would. Only one mech betrays Shimin and Zetian for the stake of saving their children, the freezer king is dethawed and is used as a tool for Zetian to take out the last emperor hundun and seek revenge for the death of Shimin in the Vermillion Bird. The ending plot twist came out of nowhere for me. There was all this scattered talk of the Gods who never showed themselves. They chose now to appear, take Shimin’s body, and let Zetian know that they would like to barter her obedience for Shimin’s life.

Like I said earlier, this book lacks worldbuilding in leu of being character driven. This left me a lot of questions by the end. What is the magic system? It is built around qi and spiritual power, but how does it actually work, is there factors that come together to have a child’s pressure be higher or lower? I want to know why we got three different readings for Zetian’s spiritual pressure, the first one being in the 600s, one above 6,000 after winning the mental battle against Yang Guang, and lastly 18,000 matching with Shimin. I want to know the connection with the spirit metal found in the ground, I have so many questions about how this world works. Since there is another book coming, I’m really hoping that it can give some answers and fill out the worldbuilding since this one is focused on connecting us with the characters.

The only thing that really let me know was that there was a heavy emphasis on a polyamorous love triangle, but I didn’t get a deep connection between the three. I wish the relationship has more development. In no way did I expect or want the romance to become the forefront of the plot, but I at least wanted it to be a subplot that could help character progression. I felt like the chemistry between Zetian and Yizhi should have been way more emotionally driven, they had liked each other for a while now and when they finally get to be together, there is more focus on his tattoos than anything else. Her and Shimin feels so messy. He thinks Zetian hates him, he feels like she is forcing herself to be with him, and when they do finally get together, it feels emotional for reasons outside of their relationship. The bond they share feels almost sterile. The only raw chemistry I felt was between the boys. Each boy gets his own blushy moment that blatantly shows they have feelings for the other, and then we get the moment where they talk to each other to confirm they want to be with each other and kiss. I thought after the kiss, the romance would peak through more, but no. We have Shimin die within the next arc and activate Zetian’s rage to bring the mission to an end and destroy the settlement.

I feel like you can’t look too deep into this book, or else you will lose the fun that I had with it. I never looked into why Zetian was able to hold these more modern beliefs despite being raised to meld to the flow of society. I never questioned why no other balanced pair woman fought back or had similar values as Zetian. The moment of Zetian basically cursing the woman who betrayed her in order to save her children (read: fight for herself and not care about others) even though her own mentality is fuck everyone except myself. Looking too much into that can only leave my brain fried.

I read this as a YA book, which it is listed as. If I went into this listed as an adult sci-fi, I would wonder why it was lacking some more things I want out of that genre. But, I think it does a good job at giving us a fun, power-fantasy driven my a girl’s rage against a system set up to sacrifice her.