Iron Widow came to my attention because it sounds pretty damn great. Who doesn't want a book about giant mech fighting based in Chinese fantasy with "400 pages of feminist rage"? It's Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid's Tale! Hell yeah! I was so down for it.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot much more to Iron Widow.

The story is pretty straightforward: in this world based in Chinese culture and myths, boys pilot giant transforming robots to battle aliens beyond the great wall. Unfortunately, to pilot the mechs, the boys need to pair with a concubine to help use her mental energy and qi...and most of these girls die after one battle. Our hero Wu Zetian becomes a concubine on purpose, in hopes of pairing with the pilot that killed her older sister.

From there, it's discovered that Zetian has a very high spirit energy, and in this universe that means she could possibly match with a pilot, instead of having the pilot kill her. But she kills the pilot she intended to, earning the name Iron Widow, and is paired with another much stronger pilot that always kills his concubines. Surprise surprise, she survives her next battle with him.

Zetian gets to know the tragic backstory of the pilot Shimin, and somewhere along the way her childhood friend, a rich boy named Yizhi, finds his way back into her life and becomes an integral third part of their pilot process.

As all this is happening, we get treated to the 400 pages of feminist rage that keeps being promised. While the rage is there, the writing is just so simplistic that there is nothing else to Zetian. She's angry and lashes out or kills a pilot, then she's punished. Sexist men say something sexist to her, so she says something angry and feminist back, and she's punished. Someone else says something sexist to her and she feels beat down mentally, but then 2 paragraphs later she says F THAT, I'M MORE THAN WHAT THEY SAY and she thinks some great feminist thoughts that make for amazing blurbs but are completely boring when it's the 50th time she's had the same thought. Rinse and repeat for 400 pages.

This is such simplistic Telling and not Showing writing. I'm no writer myself, I can't claim to know what the writing process is like, but I know what I feel as a reader. And as a reader, this got old super fast. I wanted more from Zetian than just spitting rage and cool feminist lines. I wanted some more depth and nuance.

I suppose there's some attempt at depth when it comes to the romance, and this is where I thought Iron Widow would really have its chance to shine in the sun and stand out on its own. Bisexual rep! A ménage à trois! Hell yeah!

The romances are instalove. Just pure instalove, on all sides of the triangle.

There's maybe some build up for one side of the triangle, but the other two just sort of happen. When the three of them finally come together as one, its with a couple of paragraphs about damning society because society doesn't give a damn about them, etc etc. There's just no nuance to the writing at all. Maybe if the taboo of a male/male romance or a throuple romance hadn't been hinted at in the text, then the simplistic coming together would have worked. Instead, we have Zetian thinking about how they love each other and society can go fuck itself, and so they're now together. That's it.

As for the actual plot line, that was mostly a muddle and served only to provide waypoints for Zetian's story to move forward, simply because she had to move forward to advance the story. There are lots of gross sexist pigs, there are terrible military people who don't care about women or those beneath them, there are people in power who make decisions without caring about women or those beneath them...it's the same simplistic ideas over and over again. There are no moments to take a step back and breathe in this world, to let the history and society and culture of the world building really settle in. It's ZETIAN MAD and FEMINIST RAGE and CHRYSALIS SMASH -- which is all fine and good if that's what the book wanted to be! But no, Iron Widow wants to be a novel that is fun but also hulk smashes the patriarchy, and while it does that, there's nothing else to it.

I won't go too much further into the rest of the actual plot (what little there is) because it'd involve spoilers and, quite frankly, I hated the ending. This writing and the very shallow world building did not deserve that ending at all.

With all that said, did I actually like this book?

...sort of. When I could turn my brain off and just enjoy the wish fulfillment that Zetian represented, I had a better time of it. But the writing and world building simply wasn't good enough for me to truly enjoy this world or the characters.

(Thank you NetGalley for providing an ebook copy for review.)