This felt like such a lukewarm book that I don’t understand why it’s been so highly recommended to me. Kuang’s prose is fine, not my favorite but it’s bearable. However, the characters felt very one dimensional and that all of them, Robin included, only existed to be a plot device, instead of fully fleshed out with character arcs. The theme was so clearly the violence of colonization but I hate being treated like an idiot by authors. I didn’t need multiple footnotes telling me what was essentially “colonization bad” or summarizations of what happened. This book is a masterclass in telling, not showing. I think the premise is interesting but there was no further analyzation of the effects of colonization or the intersection of race and gender (Victoire defending Letty bc they’re both women when historically black women have been treated worse than white women) or the intersection of class and race. It felt like being spoon fed that racism and colonization = bad with lesson on etymology in between these spoon fed lessons.