Just a mere peasant girl from the south, Rin discovers she is to be traded off by her foster parents to a middle-aged husband. Because the summaries of the second and third books would potentially spoil the contents of the first book, I have only included the summary of the first. I have refrained from including spoilers so that this review is accessible to those who have yet to read The Poppy War. What follows here are my concise reviews of each installment and then my overall review of the trilogy as a whole. To read more about Kuang and her comments on this trilogy, check out this profile from NPR.įor years, this trilogy has been on my radar, but it wasn’t until the end of 2022 that I was ready to crack it open and explore what this story had to offer–and I was not disappointed. She shares that learning of the Nanjing Massacre of 1930, during which Japanese soldiers brutally ravaged a Chinese city, compelled her in writing this first novel as a way to grapple with the information. In writing this trilogy, Kuang was heavily inspired by real historical events from Chinese, Japanese, and European history.

The first book, entitled The Poppy War, was Kuang’s debut novel in 2018, and since then, she has become a literary force to be reckoned with, more recently publishing books Babel and Yellowface. Kuang has been highly acclaimed among readers for years.

“This was chaos, but chaos was where she thrived…” -The Burning God by R.F.

The poppy war series order