Reading Diary: The Water Outlaws by SL Huang

Here is a synopsis from the publisher's website:

Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job.


Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away.


Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan. Mountain outlaws on the margins of society, the Liangshan Bandits proclaim a belief in justice—for women, for the downtrodden, for progressive thinkers a corrupt Empire would imprison or destroy. They’re also murderers, thieves, smugglers, and cutthroats.


Apart, they love like demons and fight like tigers. Together, they could bring down an empire.

Whew! This book was excellent, but I am also glad it's over! I need a break from stories of people standing up against corrupt officials and empire*. Like Shelley Parker-Chan's Radiant Emperor duology, this book had some sections of violence and torture that were handled with a deft touch but to me were all the more devastating for the relative lightness of actual words on the page. I appreciate the craft of the narrative as much as the actual story itself.

Overall, the narrative had a very satisfying arc, although I do wish we learned more about what happened to Lu Junyi after the general climax of the narrative. I expected Lin Chong to be the protagonist, but the narrative shifts POV throughout the book, and Lu Junyi, a friend of Lin Chong's, has a particularly tragic arc, IMO, and while I won't spoil what actually happens with her, I think her ending was both satisfying and unsatisfying.

*I started reading Amelie Wen Zhao's Song of Silver, Flame Like Night: "In a fallen kingdom, one girl carries the key to discovering the secrets of her nation’s past—and unleashing the demons that sleep at its heart. An epic fantasy series inspired by the mythology and folklore of ancient China." More fighting against Empire (and Colonizers!), but this one is YA, so even though someone is murdered in the beginning of the book, it happens between chapters one and two. We don't see the soldiers murdering the person, which is a small break for me. I almost want to leave the book for later, but it's a thick hardback book, and I don't want to pack it and bring it back home.