Field notes

Search

Search IconIcon to open search

This is just what I was in the mood for, a 300+ chapter, 4000 page sapphic slow burn court intrigue. The prose (and/or translation?) is more functional than beautiful on a sentence level, but on a plot level, with the overall character arcs, QJMX has some mad skill. Especially when she was writing as she went, chapter by chapter, serial style. (Says me, who can’t plot my way out of a paper bag.)

Every time I thought we’d reached a point where it was going to drag, nope, there’s a twist, a plot development, a time skip. Never a dull moment, which is more than I can say for most 100-page books, much less any clocking in at this massive length.

Of course it helps that I go nuts for complex court politics played out at this scale. And morally gray (to put it kindly) heroines.

A few more thoughts in list form:


Reading Progress

I rarely do status updates as I go, but JWQS called for it and I wanted to preserve these from Goodreads:


  1. Note: I was mistaken when I called it wuxia. It’s a historical c-novel, but it’s more about court intrigue than martial arts and there’s no cultivation. My bad for being so hyped about the plot summary I didn’t notice the genre. ↩︎