Xiran Jay Zhao
Autor von Iron Widow
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Wissenswertes
- Geburtstag
- 1997-09-29
- Geschlecht
- non-binary
- Nationalität
- Canada
- Land (für Karte)
- Canada
- Geburtsort
- China
- Wohnorte
- British Columbia, Canada
- Ausbildung
- Simon Fraser University
- Preise und Auszeichnungen
- Astounding Award Nominee for Best New Writer
- Agent
- Rebecca Schaeffer
- Kurzbiographie
- Xiran Jay Zhao uses they/them pronouns.
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The prose is bad. It’s bad. It’s “14 year old posts their first fanfic” bad, and not what you’d expect from a twentysomething college graduate—and certainly not in a book that’s supposedly been professionally edited. I lost track of how many sentences made me wince; suffice to say that there were many of the calibre of:
• “His chains rattle in what sounds like a motion of jolting up.” (I said that one out loud to myself in awe.)
• “A bloody haze of sunset gapes at the end of the forest path.” (How can a haze gape?)
• "Eyelids stammering, he returns to sipping from his flask." (How can eyelids stammer?)
• “Yes, and what of it?” I lash my arm. (“Lash out with” your arm rather than self-flagellate, I presume)
• “A warping scream and a flapping of robes lacerate through the stunned haze in my mind.” (It’s a mystery why I kept thinking of “My Immortal” while reading this.)
There’s no plot. Things happen in this book, but there’s no plot. Wu Zetian, the main character, makes repeated references to her plan, but she clearly has none until a couple of pages from the end.
The characters react and interact like they’re in an unusually melodramatic telenovela parody, except this is all terribly in earnest. The relationships are all tell-not-show—there are pages devoted to loving descriptions of gaudy outfits and elaborate hairstyles, and nothing to establish the relationship that the lead character must have had with her dead older sister to spark off a murderous rampage of vengeance like the one she engages in here. I get that a YA novel isn’t going to have any erotic scenes, but there’s no plausible spark—emotional, romantic, or sexual—between any members of the main m/f/m pairing.
Wu Zetian is clearly supposed to be the kind of character you can cheer on, a power fantasy for aspiring Gaslight-Gatekeep-Girlbosses. The narrative frames her as admirable, the antiheroine you’ve got to begrudgingly admit is right—yet when you combine Zetian’s actions (so much murder!) with her lack of character complexity and her emotional immaturity, she just reads like a sociopath.
Iron Widow is very fast-paced and has all the subtlety of a brick through a window, so I can see why some people are into it as a revenge fantasy. But its politics, its world-building, its internal logic, its understanding of its own characters, are all so shallow, trite and muddled that I couldn’t even enjoy it as a popcorn read. XJZ does not display the strength as a writer needed to tackle the weighty topics they tackle here—misogyny, sexual assault, systemic complicity, etc.… (mehr)