The Poppy War starts with an entrance exam that feels so much like the IIT entrance exam in India — where over 1.3 million students compete for roughly 18,000 spots, a less than 1% acceptance rate. Since the book is set in a China-inspired world, I assume it draws from a similar tradition.
One passage near the end hit me hard. The enemy attacked the land of our protagonist Rin because they did not think of her people as human. Here is the line:
“And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed?”
How many times have we seen this repeat throughout human history? The British massacred Indians during their occupation because they considered them less than human — a people with rich literature, religion, and art history, dismissed as illiterate. That framing kept their conscience protected. The logic was always the same: if the other is not fully human, then what you do to them does not count.
One of the joys of reading is building a strong empathy for fictional characters that serves us well in real life too. That is what keeps me reading.
Loved this book. The magic felt real, the world-building is immersive, and the grounding in actual history adds layers of complexity the story earns. Rin is a genuinely grey protagonist — flawed, struggling, and utterly believable. Her fight to hold onto her humanity while facing a ruthless enemy, and to discern what the right path even looks like in that darkness, is what lingers long after the last page.
Looking forward to books two and three, and to seeing where Rin’s journey takes her — in the physical world, the spiritual, and her emotional growth.
Anna Bushi 