I am a big fan of this book.  It is by no means the type of fantasy book where our protagonist sails through one good choice after another in a battle between a binary good/evil. Rin is complex, morally ambiguous, and makes.. terrible choices (to spare any spoilers in case I’m not the last person to read this; please check the TW before reading).  Kuang creates a rich but also dark world—drawn from 20th-Century China and the real life Sino-Japanese War—filled with the horrors of war and the consequences of reaching for power.   When I finished, it was one of those books that had to tumble around in my head before I could pick up another book.  It was intense, well-written, and a book I would highly recommend.