One chunky spoiler in what follows as I want to talk about it, but it’s pretty heavily given away in at least one blurb so I’m not blurring it out
Mm. I think the kindest thing to say about this is that it’s a debut novel and it shows in its unevenness. Set in a fantasy China at war with a fantasy Japan, it it a rewrites 19th and 20th century history in a world where gods are real and can be summoned, magic happens and there’s also technology in the form of cannons and trebuchets. Poor orphan in a brutal foster family gets an owl summoning her to Hogwarts passes the country-wide exam to be admitted to the highest military academy in the country. Once there, she discovers she is Different, and also an undiscovered shaman. She gets taught magic, goes off to join a unit of magic users as fantasy Japan invades, and ends up committing genocide.
The problem is, none of this really works. The world-building is clunky, the magic-tech balance not clear, and the military school section could be set in any contemporary US university tv series. I had to search the book to make sure my memory of someone saying ‚dude‘ was in fact false. The being-taught-magic-by-eccentric-teacher bits were done far better by Patrick Rothfuss.
Yeah, the genocide. We‘re meant to be shocked! shocked I tell you! after our heroine has been exposed to fantasy Rape of Nanking and fantasy Unit 731 and fantasy Comfort Women - and yes, mining not-very-distant historical evils in service of a fantasy book is fairly questionable - and then decides to fantasy nuke the whole of fantasy Japan in revenge. The only interesting twist here is when she asserts this was destined to be and the unleashed god in question says nuh-uh, this was all specifically your choice. But given that the author’s thumb has been heavily on the scales for the last hundred pages, it’s far too late to try and pull any Ender’s Game moral ambiguity out of the story.
I don’t care enough about any of the characters or the dangling plot threads to read the rest of the trilogy.
As a palate cleanser, I re-read the Goblin Emperor, which is a master-class in elegant world-building without info-dumps, and felt a lot better.