It’s interesting that the marketing on the jacket doesn’t really tell you this is basically just half of the last book. Thankfully, I already knew that and waited until I had both to start them. It’s two thousand pages long, after all. 

As you might expect, it makes this book a bit odd because there’s a pretty left field transition somewhere around the midway mark that I thought was a digression, but ended up being a major part of the book. Half meta history narrative that I’ve come to enjoy from Liu, half… I don’t even know. Romance, deconstruction on colonialism via alternating viewpoints centered around a competition between two restaurants, which you’d expect to be “Just” about cooking, but in Liu fashion, is just an unusual, fascinating lens for the myopic view, once the meta historical narrative slows down. 

This is also unusual in the genre due to it being significantly “low” in its fantasy. More like fantastical trimmings, as the technologies employed are more industrial than anything else. Sure, there’s fantastic creatures than breath fire, but I think that’s about it, really. Everything else is much more interested in being historical fiction in a different context, which will be polarizing to a fan base continually on-boarded by hard worldbuilding fantasy with good vs evil narratives ala Sanderson. Lucky for me, The Dandelion Dynasty is almost exactly what I want from my fantasy, so this growing popularity and trend is not at all of interest to me. (Almost because I actually would like more magic/fantastical elements). 

It still doesn’t make this tick my X factor 5 star though. It would be really difficult to do so in just half a book. Still, there’s some incredibly dynamic themes and characters on display that make hundreds of pages around a cooking competition absolutely riveting. A feat in of itself.