I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book was both brutal and brilliant, and I'm really not sure how to put this into words. The Poppy War describes the events of several years, Rin's time at the Academy, and her time with many different teachers and comrades. It is also more than 500 pages.

Rin is one of the best protagonists I have ever seen - desperate and brutal and loveable and infuriating. Even though this book had every horrible thing I could think of (including genocide, graphic description of rape, killing children, gore, drug addiction, self-harm and many more - a list of trigger warnings would be longer than this review), I devoured it in two days because I had to know what happened next.

I also knew from the set-up that not everyone would make it out, and yet I kept hoping until the last page that my favourites would be all right.

(Seriously, what was that about Nezha supposedly hiding something? We never really found out.)

In all honesty, I wasn't sure what to think of the end, and I think I'm still processing it, but I can't deny that this was a brilliantly written novel.

((note: it was super weird to see poppy seeds exclusively referred to as drugs and hallucinogens when we just. put that stuff in our food casually where I'm from.))