When you see "buffalo" on an elephant's cage, don't believe your eyes. Galina Yuzefovich's comments made her read it, and then she found out that Natalia Osoyanu praises her and Fanzongoryacho approves of it. So they all found something in Rebecca Kuong's debut novel that meets their ideas about decent literature, and you didn't find it. I'm not going to curse my own limitations, we're all very different, and it's good to let a hundred flowers blossom - I'll just tell you about the "Poppy War" that I saw.
The story of an orphan who was brought up in a family of village shopkeepers who made a girl a servant for everything, a babysitter for her son and a drug courier. Fani's main income comes not from the legal trade, but from opium smuggling. In a country called Nikanomi in this space, drugs are strictly forbidden, and selling, storing, and using drugs are equally punishable by death. But in this version of China, almost as in Russia, the cruelty of laws is compensated by the optionality of their enforcement. Cruel adoptive parents manage to keep the family business boat afloat with dexterity and bribes. The girl is not satisfied with this, but she still has no choice but to put up with it. Until the moment when a matchmaker appears in the house and Rin finds out about an upcoming wedding with a widow official three times older than herself. She is simply sold in exchange for additional security guarantees for poppy trade.
Stamp number one theme of the poor orphan, the second is "the man overcoming". The girl will not only be an external student with the minimal help of a village teacher but will pass the exam with the best result in the history of the province and get the right to enter the Military Academy - the most prestigious institution in the country. If you think that her troubles will end here, you are deeply mistaken. The bullying and ridicule of rich students, the contempt of teachers, the lack of basic knowledge, all make the girl's first year of study a living hell. But she will cope, who would doubt.
Only the theme of a stalling and sticking social elevator is not enough to keep the reader's attention, it is necessary to introduce a third win-win topic - esoterics and drug tricks. To instruct a promising student, rejected by other teachers, takes a professor of heritage Jiang, and then you will be offered all the repeatedly rolled in literature and film versions of the course of a young soldier, up to the pig, which the student wears every day at the watering hole to the mountain spring, pouring strength with a set of wards weight. And, ta-Damm, Jiang is a great specialist in various hallucinogens, which for some reason are presented here in versions practiced in all parts of the world, from Siberia to Mesoamerica.
While the mentor is waiting for the mentee's enlightenment, she wants absolute weapons: to become them or to learn to call for help. The fact is that the mainland is under the constant threat of invasion by the island neighbors of the militarist Federation (uh, Japan). The soldiers of their killing machine do not know pity, do not recognize the rules of war; to carve out the population of an entire city is more of a norm than an exception for them. Even if they surrendered voluntarily, I am referring to the entire population, including the elderly, pregnant women and infants. In the last war, this happened to Spear Island, whose inhabitants were the best warriors in the empire, now there is only one, the best student of the Altan Academy.
Do we have to explain that the heroine will love the legendary young man? It should be specified that she will become the best and that the war will begin neatly to the time of graduation? The remaining two-thirds of the reader's consciousness will be raped by the horrors of war, described with such love of naturalistic details, which involuntarily suggests that the author feels a lot of pleasure from them. For a long time, tediously, repeatedly and in a variety of ways. Not quite a common stamp on the amateur, but they are always enough for this. And in order to have even more fun, let's shift the drug trivia, during which the heroes will discover the "great" truth.
Everything would be okay, but why, explain to me someone, was this mess with the twenty-sixth hexagram of I Ching. Okay, it's nothing that they guess not in the classical tradition with bamboo stems, but in a truncated Americanized version with coins. But the twenty-sixth hexagram Da Chu (Upbringing great) is quite different in meaning and content. If there was such an irresistible need to stick the Book of Changes to the entourage, so at least to choose a suitable prediction in the sense of prediction could be. Or not necessarily? Do People do that? After all, we have just another story about how a girl becomes a Man (with a big M)