I cannot express how excited I was to receive an ARC of Heart of the Sun Warrior (thank you Netgalley and Harper Voyager!). Falling back into Tan’s world with this sequel was so effortless. Honestly, when we wrapped up Daughter of the Moon Goddess, everything felt… resolved, so I wasn’t sure where this would take us. I’m unfamiliar with the mythology of Chang’e and had no expectations entering Heart of the Sun Warrior. That said, I did struggle to understand the story arc for the first third of the book - the action is well-paced, but I kept wishing that the central conflict had been made just a bit more explicit earlier on.

Minor plot commentary aside, this book is just as stunning as its predecessor. The IMAGERY. I could get lost in this world, and Tan’s prose is so poetic and insightful that I often just paused to appreciate a phrase or a description - Xingyin commenting on the forgotten beauty of a half-moon, visualizing a “painstaking effort” as “trying to untangle a folded cobweb…”, reflecting on the role death plays in an immortals’ war (“Death would feast well, gorging itself over the immortal table it had once been cast from”).

And the character development! The character arcs for Xingyin, Wenzhi and Liwei in particular are so well-paced, and Tan’s execution of the love triangle is so surprising and original that I wasn’t even frustrated with it? I am no fan of love triangles, but this one works, particularly because it’s less about the conflict between characters and more about their personal growth - I loved the evolving alliances and the constant flux between each of the three.

The. Ending. It was so layered and so entirely unexpected. I can’t stop thinking about it. This was a 4-star read, solely due to plot confusion at the start, but then the ending swept me up, so a solid 4.5 it is.