A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang

Published: October 1, 2024 by St. Martin’s Press

Buy this book at: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo

Synopsis:

Inspired by the legend of Xishi, one of the famous Four Beauties of Ancient China, A Song to Drown Rivers is an epic historical fantasy about womanhood, war, sacrifice, and love against all odds.
Her beauty hides a deadly purpose.

Xishi’s beauty is seen as a blessing to the villagers of Yue—convinced that the best fate for a girl is to marry well and support her family. When Xishi draws the attention of the famous young military advisor, Fanli, he presents her with a rare opportunity: to use her beauty as a weapon. One that could topple the rival neighboring kingdom of Wu, improve the lives of her people, and avenge her sister’s murder. All she has to do is infiltrate the enemy palace as a spy, seduce their immoral king, and weaken them from within.

Trained by Fanli in everything from classical instruments to concealing emotion, Xishi hones her beauty into the perfect blade. But she knows Fanli can see through every deception she masters, the attraction between them burning away any falsehoods.

Once inside the enemy palace, Xishi finds herself under the hungry gaze of the king’s advisors while the king himself shows her great affection. Despite his gentleness, a brutality lurks and Xishi knows she can never let her guard down. But the higher Xishi climbs in the Wu court, the farther she and Fanli have to fall—and if she is unmasked as a traitor, she will bring both kingdoms down.

Rating:

Review:

Whew, it’s been a minute since I posted on here. Sorry about that. I rather had a tsunami upend my life for the past month and I did not have the brain power for writing or reading. From some very complicated and emotional things going on in my relationship, and difficult decisions to be made. Then my children kindly shared a stomach bug with me and so collectively there was someone in my house vomiting for about 4 weeks. Then obviously Thanksgiving. My oldest won her class Spelling Bee so we’ve been practicing for the school-wide Spelling Bee. She also had a percussion concern and a choir concert. I don’t know how such introverted parents ended up with such a social butterfly. Anyway, that’s enough about me, on to the book…as lackluster as this one may have been.

I will not claim to be an expert on this Chinese legend, but I was familiar with it before reading the book and read about it further since reading the book. And I have to say, this book could have been amazing. It could have been epic. But instead it was just alright. While the synopsis describes this as an “epic historical fantasy” there is zero fantasy in here. None at all. It’s just a retelling of a legend, written as historical fiction.

The first thing that let me down in this story was the romance. Xishi and Fanli spent a grand total of 13 weeks together, they apparently fall in love during that time. We see hardly any of what happens in that 13 weeks. We rush through it in about 40 pages. Mostly we get a recap from Xishi about all the things they learned. We see the two of them interact only two or three times before they profess their love. And then five minutes later, Xishi is gone. And she’s gone for YEARS. Literal years. And yet she’s still so deeply in love with guy that she almost ruins a plan that was years in the making. What? I just didn’t buy into their epic romance.

The entire beginning of the book felt rushed. Initially I thought that the reason we were rushing was so that we could get to the main portion of the plot. The part where Xishi has to woo the Wu king and set him up to be conquered from within. Once we got there though, nothing happened. We spent so many pages on Xishi smiling demurely and asking the king curious questions that it felt like we were doing nothing. Also, for a book about a concubine this book was very chaste. All sex scenes happen “off screen”, so it felt like they did a lot of laying together chastely in bed and that was about it. Maybe this was because the author typically writes Young Adult, but it felt odd in an adult book about such an adult topic. Ultimately we spent most of our time watching Xishi seduce a drunken idiot, who didn’t seem to be as terrible of a human as the book wanted me to believe.

The ending of this book was really its saving grace. Even though I did not care about the conclusion of Xishi and Fanli’s romance, the ending did have some other excellent moments. The lessons about politics and war were great. I found myself nodding in agreement with every single one of Xishi’s revelations. This was the moment I wanted through the rest of the book. This was the action that I was missing! And the conclusion was as tragic as expected. If the ending hadn’t nailed it then this might have been a 2-star book for me.