Check out my full video review.

I'm not going to get into all of the discourse surrounding To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods here, but I will say that I think the most respect I can afford the works targeted by Cait Corrain is to engage with them honestly and take them seriously.

I went into this expecting I might find a misunderstood book if all its defenders were to be believed. Unfortunately, what I found was a very poorly crafted book that is confused about its own messaging.

Within the first couple of pages, you already have a sense of how tortured this prose is. It starts with a cliche and spends the next paragraphs beating that cliche to death. I believe that Chang might feel like she is showing us things because of her overuse of metaphors, but these descriptions are often reserved for our surroundings. The things we want to see—our characters, their connections, their growth, the world, the violence and tragedy of colonialism—are instead just told to us. Again and again and again. The first chapter has no action. Ruying, our main character, walks a couple of steps while she just info-dumps about her world. It's this kind of redundant and graceless exposition that you can expect throughout the entire book.

Peppered throughout the repetition and bloated prose are lines, descriptions, and turns of phrases that make little to no sense. This writing style favors style over substance and should've been edited with a more strict hand. I'm saying this as someone who loves flowery writing, who understands the influence of oral tradition and description on non-Western stories, and who genuinely enjoys prose you can sink your teeth into. This is not any of that to me, and even within that context, your writing must first be understood. Chang's style doesn't reach incomprehensible, but there were one too many head-scratching moments for me.

Apart from the writing, I question so many of the world-building decisions here. This is not the first place in which the marketing for this book has done it no favors. This is a science fantasy in which a second world interacts with an alternate history of our world. The delivery of that information in this story is clunky. The decision to make the colonizers Romans is still baffling to me. Lots about this world just isn't explained. Fans might say that we have to wait for more information in further books, which is all dandy, except that it leaves THIS book that I read and am reviewing feeling patchy and undercooked.

It also felt underpopulated. This is not a rich and vibrant world. Even the characters who surround our main character feel flat and often forgotten by the story. Ruying dusts off her sister, grandmother, or best friends when she needs to feel slightly bad about murder for a second, but otherwise, there is a lack of awareness of anyone outside of Ruying and Prince Colonizer. For a large portion of this book, I didn't even understand if there were other neighboring countries, or who they were, or what they looked like. We receive that confirmation when it's plot-convenient to trot out an Emperor to kill shortly after. It weakens this story that claims to be looking at what our main character would do to save her family to have that family be so disconnected from the story and the main character.

Generally, I think Ruying was too weak a character to lead this story. I mean that in the sense of characterization. She didn't feel fully formed to me and often her motivations were too shallow. She wants to protect her family—Fine. The book did not sell that to me. The book did not convince me that what Ruying was doing was even protecting them or that she should believe that it would. Then the book confuses Ruying's motivations more by occasionally insinuating that maybe Ruying just likes to kill and has darkness inside of her, so maybe it's not about her family at all? Which would make sense considering the relationship she has with them and the way they baseically are like "please, if this is you protecting us, stop immediately." The problem is that if Ruying just likes killing, it changes the story completely. Those two motivations flop about in the story like dead fish, and honestly, it feels like it barely matters because all that matters is focusing most of the energy on Prince Colonizer.

Is this a colonizer romance? Yes, in the sense that most of the plot focuses on developing romantic feelings with a colonizer. Is he end game? Only Molly X. Chang knows, but that doesn't change that in THIS book, we mostly watch romantic feelings develop between Ruying and Prince Colonizer. I would also note that to this very day, Chang is still promoting this as enemies to lovers, villain romance, Reylo, Dramaoine, and Zutara. I'm not sure where the idea that this is some deep anti-colonial study came in. If we believe the author herself, this is very interested in its romance.

There was a part of me that was able to give this the benefit of the doubt for a while. I could see that Chang was trying to show us that the dynamic between Ruying and Prince Colonizer was at least manipulative. We have enough outside forces telling Ruying that the relationship is bad to feel like there was an attempt to counter the descriptions of his beauty and all the fluttery feelings they have when they are around each other. We also see the tactics Prince Colonizer uses in isolating Ruying, preying on her insecurities, and over-identifying with the "darkness" inside of her. There is also the fact that Prince Colonizer is basically threatening Ruying to do his bidding, though the strength of all of this is weakened by the fact that we get a time jump at the beginning of their relationship. We just suddenly go from Ruying walking around and telling us how much Rome sucks to being like, "six months later, I'd killed 48 people, and wow, isn't Prince Colonizer handsome?" If your argument is that this is a look at corruption and manipulation, why would you jump over the period of time where most of that would happen?

This is further weakened as the story goes on, and we spend more time on the classic enemies-to-lovers trope beats. Everything is lost to those beats, and it feels like, ultimately, that is where most of the energy of this book is focused. I was astounded when we followed up Ruying's anger at a "reveal" that Prince Colonizer is interested in war, actually, with a one-bed trope moment. Again, that's the depth you can expect from this work overall.

This is confirmed for me by the end. I think one of the biggest mistakes here is tying this story to real-life events like Unit 731. The author did that outright in her author's note. It's not a supposition on my part. The author mentions taking inspiration from Unit 731. First of all, the book treats human experimentation as a reveal, which is bonkers to me. The first thing we learn is that the colonizers are pumping drugs into the population to keep them addicted. I'm not sure how you start there and think that GASP, THE PRINCE IS CONDUCTING HUMAN EXPERIMENTS? is a plot twist or even a satisfying plot build. Apart from that, Prince Colonizer's brother, Other Prince Colonizer, tells Ruying that Prince Colonizer is conducting experiments. Then, PRINCE COLONIZER HIMSELF TELLS RUYING THAT THEY HAVE CONDUCTED EXPERIMENTS ON HER PEOPLE. RUYING JUST IGNORES IT. SHE DOESN'T CARE. Ruying's childhood best friend tries to tell her about the experiments we already know about, too, but she literally is like, "Shh, I don't want to know." How are we supposed to root for this person?

In the end, when Ruying finally "finds out" about the experiments she was told about like 4-5 times, she's in shock! Horror!

...but not about the HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION. She's mad because Prince Colonizer lied to her. Honestly, that's what confirmed to me that this is a colonizer romance. This isn't the story of a woman being manipulated or being corrupted into believing colonization is good, and then she finds out colonization is bad, actually. Ruying knows all along. Ruying is a tool of the violence of colonization and for shallow reasons the book doesn't do a good job of selling. It's not even like Ruying is like, "Wow, Prince Colonizer was an evil, murderous colonizer before, and now he's doing human experimentation so I've seen the light!" because in that moment, what matters most is the interpersonal: he lied to her. Because what matters most in this book is the interpersonal.

This is also emphasized by the fact that before we get the non-reveal reveal of Unit 731, we get one single point-of-view chapter from Prince Colonizer so that we can hear in his own words that he really, really does have really true feelings for Ruying and he's pretty sorry about how he has to be here, colonizing and stuff. Then, we spend the last chapters with him crying about how sad he is that Ruying is mad at him for human experimentation. This book does not shy away from trying to "morally gray" this character. (In fact, the author often uses "morally gray" to describe her characters. I have a hard time understanding what's gray here...) He's under the influence and thumb of his grandfather who is the big, even more evil guy than the guy doing human experimentation. He has scars on his back. He had a hard childhood. He really believes that in different circumstances, he and Ruying could've made it work because of his feelings for her. It's all pretty gross to me, honestly. By the end of the book, I felt a little sick.

I also feel like there are some weird and perhaps inadvertent messages here that support colonialist ideas. This book sets itself up as being science vs magic. The colonizers have science and the colonized have magic. First of all, lol WHAT? Second of all, it goes so ham on perpetrating this idea that the colonized are backward and scienceless that they don't even have medicine or surgery??? How do you make fantasy China and say they don't have SCIENCE OR MEDICINE? Another thing it does is set up the idea that the colonized don't even really know about their own magic. Prince Colonizer has a whole speech about how they were able to subjugate Pangu because they were so unevolved and backward. And yes, this is coming from Prince Colonizer so we aren't necessarily meant to agree, but everything about this book also CONFIRMS that very racist and colonialist idea. Ruying IS going to evolve her magic in order to defeat the Romans.

It's all so messy and thoughtless to me. It read like these real tragedies and serious topics were being used as set dressing for the relationships and enemies-to-lovers nonsense the story really wanted to explore.

Ultimately, I'm sure there is an audience out there for this book. It fits in line with something like Fourth Wing, which uses big ideas about violence and war, waters them down, and shoves them aside to focus on relationships that are driven by tropes and stereotypes. In doing so and also tying this to historical events, Chang has unfortunately put her book in a bad position. It was rather disturbing to me to see the way that the Unit 731 "inspiration" is sanitized and presented. Meanwhile, people will continue to argue about whether this is YA or not, or romance or not, or colonizer romance or not (despite the fact that most of what Chang has said about her own book confirms that it is all of those things...). And honestly, you may have to read it for yourself to find out.

All I know is that this is not a book I have a single positive thing to say about.