The Wall of Storms

I read The Grace of Kings earlier this year, and it was an imperfect book that I came to enjoy immensely by the end. The Wall of Storms is the second entry in the series, and it made me realize that while The Grace of Kings was competent as a standalone book what it was really meant to do was load the bases for this grand slam of a story. This is Epic Fantasy at its very best, and this entry in the series personally ranks itself next to The Wise Man's Fear as among my favorite “second books” and more generally as one of my favorite takes on the genre.

The Wall of Storms directly follows The Grace of Kings and brings us up to speed on the last few years of Emperor Kuni's (Ragin) Reign. The title of this story is a reference to both the tumult of a young dynasty as well as a geographic feature of the world of Dara, Kuni Garu puts it best himself, “a young dynasty must pass through a Wall of Storms before the first succession.” This is a story about succession but more than that, this story serves to expand the world and introduce us to new characters that will carry the remainder of the series. I don't want to give away any more plot than that, if you liked GoK chances are you're going to love this book.

More generally I want to say that while I appreciated the prose in GoK, Ken Liu really put some effort into this book to take it to the next level. Often, I find that fantasy novels like to inject in-universe poetry and philosophy to introduce chapters or backfill the world; rarely if ever does the story directly reference those tidbits. What Ken Liu has done is bind the poetry and philosophy of his world directly into the plot, the people of his world really do follow this in-universe philosophy and every piece of poetry is not only beautiful wordplay but chock full of puzzles and foreshadowing. Nothing that bloated the first half of GoK has gone to waste, with the solid foundation GoK provided Wall of Storms has built something magnificent.

I did a little research and found out that the author considers this book and its sequel The Veiled Throne to be two halves of one entry in the series, so I am very excited to see where the story goes from here. Ken Liu has also gone on record to explain that this story is a fantastical retelling of the Han foundation myth (the chu-han contention, for anyone trying to google up), and the series is more generally a de-westernized interpretation of the “narrative of modernity”. This is a new flavor for a lot of fantasy readers, and I personally can't get enough of it. I mentioned this in my GoK review, but I really love the infusion of different tropes and ideas; this series has done a fantastic job of repurposing what was for what will be.

I only had one small critique if you can even call it that: for all the time we spent with Kuni in the first book this second entry largely bypasses his character. While we never get another glimpse from his perspective Kuni still features in this novel, he does not take a prominent role and is not the center of the story. I haven't read the third book so there could very well be amazing flashbacks to his perspective still to come but I was still disappointed with how distant he was from the readers' perspective. If you opt to read this story it will make sense why this is the case, but I largely signed on to read this sequel in the hopes for some quippy badassery from everyone's favorite low-born bandit emperor.

TL;DR: If you liked No. 1, you'll love No.2. On a macro level it seems this is everyone's favorite entry in the series and it's for good reason. Do not sleep on the Dandelion Dynasty.