Reviews with content warning for Racism - To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X. Chang

19 reviews

jebecky's review

Ugh, I hated all the characters, the story felt really unoriginal, there was no character development. The reason I almost finished the book is because introduction by the author was so interesting.

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bookishexpat's review against another edition

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Not a bad premise, but the writing is a little info-dumpy and flat so despite the intriguing premise and world, the overall effect is quite boring unfortunately.
This kind of storyline really needs a more compelling writing style IMO, something more expressive and more emotionally stirring.

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bree_h_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

First and foremost, this book is more of a victim of bad marketing than anything else. The book is not a romance; it includes a romantic subplot, and the intention is for the relationship between Antony (the coloniser) and Ruying to be toxic. However, that doesn’t absolve the books of all its faults.

I will give the book a few points in its favour. There were several moments where the writing really stood out to me. I was impressed and could see that Molly X. Chang has a lot of potential. I also think that the complexity and moral greyness of Baihu and Ruying was interesting. More focus and time should have been given to this aspect of the characters. It had the potential to offer a compelling commentary on what people do to survive colonization/oppression. It would have been captivating to compare and contrast them, to show them coming to understand each other, and to demonstrate how each has used their position to benefit those they care for. However, that didn’t happen. The repetitive writing gave the impression of inactivity. Additionally, there was a tendency to tell rather than show (I’ll mention this later in my dislikes).

Issue one and my personal biggest issue is that Ruying felt extremely stupid. Because there’s a six-month time skip, instead of showing us Antony gaining Ruying’s trust and isolating her and demonstrating to her why she should believe that he wants the best for her and her world, we’re told this over and over and over. And this isn’t emphasised for the reader. We don’t get demonstrations of him living up to Ruying’s view. We get Ruying questioning if she can trust him over and over before moving on like it’s not a big deal and him saying suspicious things. It’s fine if Ruying is an unreliable narrator, but I feel like the reader should either buy into or understand why she feels this way. It was something I couldn’t do. It just made Ruying feel like an idiot. Which ALSO emphasised a telling over showing issue because we’re told over and over how smart she is. Ruying was raised by the brilliant mind behind the country’s greatest general. She’s SUPPOSED to be smart. She’s SUPPOSED to know how to navigate politics and manipulate people. And she just doesn’t. That made the book far more frustrating in the end.

THIS NEXT SECTION WILL CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS.

Issue two, the sad kicked puppy coloniser prince, Antony Augustus. I found the book’s approach to Antony strange and dismissed it as Ruying being an “unreliable narrator.” This doesn’t excuse the issues. I was increasingly frustrated seeing this coloniser who is RUNNING human experiments framed as a sad boy who was just in a bad situation. He doesn’t WANT to do his experiments and kill people, but he needs to save his home world! He doesn’t WANT to kill the emperor of another kingdom, but he needs to ensure they won’t back out of their treaty. He WANTS to help Ruying’s people, but this can only be done by ruling over them. But that’s okay because he’s interested in their culture and the world! I couldn’t believe any of it, but Ruying did, so we had no choice but to watch this awful man be mooned over by his victim. All the language surrounding him was soft and gentle and traditionally romantic. If they had used more aggressive words to subtly convey a sense of unease, this would have been MUCH better. And it would have given the sense that deep down, Ruying knew something was off. Antony’s own POV chapter highlights this issue. The entire chapter focuses on making him a love-sick boy who’s dreading the heartbreak he’ll experience when his VICTIM realises that he’s been lying to her and experimenting on people like her. This cannot be justified by the use of first person or an unreliable narrator because the chapter, titled “Antony,” is written in third person. It also didn’t take much looking for me to find marketing for the book calling it “enemies to lovers” and stating it is “Zutara inspired”. And we can’t dismiss those as referring to Baihu. There was no romantic subplot with him in THIS book, AND a lot of that marketing EXPLICITLY referred to Antony.

SPOILERS END

Issue three, the writing was very repetitive. While I understand the repeating of ideas in a text, there are times where it’s too heavy-handed. While reading, I noted I was going to pull my hair out if I read “girl blessed by death” one more time. Multiple characters use that EXACT phrase and it felt tired. It was like the author was worried the reader would forget Ruying’s power. Not to mention the same ideas came up over and over and over for Ruying to angst over. Which CAN work, but outside of Ruying angsting I can’t provide a solid story of what happened in the book outside of the occasional assassination until you hit the last 20%. This repetitive writing also threw off the pacing. The book could have been great if it had taken more time to tell a story that delved deeper into Ruying’s angst instead of just paying lip service to it. Because the themes it wanted to tackle could have been interesting and complex and added depth to the story.

Issue four, setting the scene. This is the lesser of my issues, but it is the only other one to make this list. (As this review is already 1,011 words.) I found the writing to set the scenes the characters were in to be lacking. And while this was adequate when nothing was happening, I felt lost in action scenes. I found it surprising and disappointing that the author did not describe the settings in beautiful, flowery language, especially considering the amount used to describe Ruying’s inner turmoil. And as mentioned, since I had no sense of the space in action scenes, I felt so lost in what was happening. I don’t need every leaf on every tree described, it just felt lacking.

Overall, I think this book needed a few more editing passes done, a couple sensitivity readers, and better marketing. Molly X. Chang DOES have a lot of potential, her work just needs polish. I am currently planning to read book 2 after it comes out to see if the story improves, because I think it CAN be a great series.

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alliallialli's review against another edition

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dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

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bookboxbabe's review

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the writing is so circular and confusing at the same time and i just can not read anymore of it. i have been trying to read it for a month and it’s just not happening, i’m sorry

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booksalacarte's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

To gaze upon wicked gods- 3.5⭐️ .5🌶️

Fantasy

Dual POV

Magic

Eastern Asian influence

Colonized nation

Rebellion

Intrigue

Coming of age

War

The cover of this book is beautiful. Truly.

The plot was interesting, bringing up the question of technology vs magic. Whether the magic would stunt an empire from growing to their full potential because of the reliance in the mythical… and how it would hold up against technology and modernism. I found the call to look at the morality of power and what it means to different people to be a good topic to pursue. I appreciated the book showing the birth of a political assassin, even if it was really annoyingly that the FMC’s grandma taught her everything that she needs to know about fighting, stealth, knife work… a bit too conveniently.

The pacing of the book was broken up quite a bit by repetitive inner dialogue as well as for-shadowing mentioned multiple times, making the twists and turns fairly predictable.

The characters were fine. The FMC having her inner struggle of morality was interesting… both FMC and the MMC being morally grey was ok… but having feelings for the MMC with the oppression and emotional manipulation was icky. It gave Stockholm syndrome vibes and not necessarily in a good way. The book was mostly in the FMC’s POV, with a single VERY short chapter in the MMC’s POV. It almost felt like we were meant to sympathize with the MMC? While he was painted as a terrible person TO the FMC the whole time. Ugh.

Anyway… I wish things were a little deeper, when it came to the side characters. They felt very surface level.

Over all, this book gave post-apocalyptic earth realm colonizing other realms. Finding a love story in the opposing sides is hard to empathize with. I think I want to know what is going to happen, but at the same time I hope this is just a duology.

Thank you NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group- Ballantine and Del-Rey for the eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

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caseythereader's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Thanks to Del Rey Books for the free copy of this book.

- I had very high hopes for TO GAZE UPON WICKED GODS. It met some of them - an inventive magic system and a great world full of hard choices and morally gray characters. Plus, the staccato style of the writing kept everything moving at a breakneck pace.
- Where it fell short for me was characterization. Ruying has practically only one personality trait, a drive to protect her family. And we know this because she states it every other page, along with other basic facts of the story, over and over again.
- There is also a six month time jump in the middle of the book. During that span, we miss what sounds like some heart pounding action, and also the entirety of the budding relationship between Ruying and her colonizer captor. We’re simply told that she’s drawn to him, but we skipped the parts where she learned more about him and built trust.
- The trust part in particular is was very difficult for me to swallow. It’s glaringly obvious that he does not have the good intentions he professes, and yet Ruying is ready to follow him to the ends of the earth (and therefore, the end of her people and her country).

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