If you don’t live under a rock in the depths of the sea, chances are you’ve heard about Iron Widow once or twice, or about a hundred times in the past few months. The hype is real with this one and let me tell you, it is deserved. A pitch like “Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid’s Tale in a polyamorous reimaging of China’s only female emperor” is as unique as it is intriguing. From the author’s letter, you learn that this is a love letter to Chinese culture and the only female emperor while also an unflinching portrayal of a system designed to keep women from succeeding at anything. Let me give you a bit of background:
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the Humduns, mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall intent on breaking through. The only downside of these heroic battles is that they always end in the death of the girls since the pilots overpower them during the mental exertion portion of these fights. Iron Widow follows 18-year-old Wu Zetian who offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, not to earn her family some money but to avenge the pilot responsible for her sister’s death. She knows anyone signing up is essentially signing their death warrant and has made her peace with it— vengeance over survival. But what Zetian doesn’t expect is not only successfully killing her sister’s murderer but emerging from the cockpit unscathed. Labeled as the Iron Widow, the most feared of female pilots, she is paired up with the scariest and strongest male pilot in Huaxia, Li Shimin, to keep her under the patriarchy’s idle thumb. But now that Zetian has found all this power within her, there’s no way she’s giving it up. Determined to make the pilot system work for her, Zetian is on her way to stop girls from being sacrificed to men’s power—and to dismantle the patriarchy while she’s at it.
Iron Widow is a chunky read and it’s difficult to formulate just how much this story has got going for it. But if you’re into unlikely alliances, enemies-to-lovers, fantastic Asian and queer rep as well as a girl who will stop at nothing to give her fellow women the equality they deserve, then have I got the book for you.
We follow Wu Zetian not only form a connection with Li Shimin but also her best friend Gao Yizhi joining the fight for equality. This unlikely trio fights to dismantle the patriarchy—all the while trying to stay alive long enough to achieve said goal—and we get to learn so much about each of them through their connections to the other. As they learn to trust each other, they also learn more about themselves and what’s at stake if they can’t make their new roles work.
I can already see readers swooning over Li Shimin and Gao Yizhi for different reasons and rightly so. Without giving too much away, Li Shimin, “the Iron Demon” has a lot of depth to his character and to how he became who he is. As you get to see that history unravel, you can’t help but want to fight the unjust system yourself. Meanwhile, Gao Yizhi is the kind of “cinnamon roll that could actually kill you” portrayal fantasy readers are going to devour.
The absolute highlight of this book and what made it unputdownable for me, however, was our protagonist Wu Zetian and the themes of feminism we get to explore through her eyes. The author takes a deep dive into the unrelenting and unfair gender roles Wu Zetian’s society tries to uphold at any cost and how that not only affects how people treat her but how she, in par, treats others. There are so many powerful and feminist moments in this story that I basically highlighted a quote on every second page of Iron Widow. While Wu’s actions and thoughts sometimes didn’t match up when it came to approaching other girls and women, her fight to reclaim her right to be equal to men is downright intoxicating to read about. As you watch her best the other pilots and ruthlessly avenge those she has lost, you also get to see just how deeply ingrained the belief that women are lesser is in Huaxia and especially within Wu Zetian’s family and why her fight is such a worthwhile one. You can’t help but root for Wu Zetian as she defies all odds in a brutal system designed to keep her and every female down. All I can really say is, if you love stories where women bite back, this one needs to be on your TBR.
Where things sort of took a dive for me was when it came to the worldbuilding. Blame it on my tired brain but I had the hardest time keeping up with the concepts of Iron Widow—I mean, the premise? Ten out of ten, would recommend. The actual explanation for how everything came to be and the whole chrysalises and qi and pilot bonds went a bit over my head because we get to see a lot of them unfold as the chapters go on instead of having the answers early on. The funny thing is, I know this was an intentional choice to circumvent info dumping, which is always a difficulty in fantasy novels. But in this one little case, I think I would have embraced the info dumping over the strewn information we got because, even though qi as a concept sounds downright amazing, I still don’t have a real grasp on it. Then again, I could very well be talking out of my butt at this point and this will be elaborated on in the sequel, who knows? Besides, my confusion over the different qi forms and affinities didn’t take away from my enjoyment at all, so I think readers who pay attention will have no problem understanding all the intricacies of Huaxia’s fight to protect the Great Wall against Hunduns. And I can’t wait to see where the sequel takes Wu Zetian and those powers.
An unapologetically queer and feminist sci-fi adventure with a ruthlessly compelling protagonist and an explosive ending that ramps up the stakes for the sequel, Iron Widow is perfect for fantasy lovers and fighters of the feminist agenda!
Iron Widow is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of September 21st 2021.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Pacific Rim meets The Handmaid’s Tale in this blend of Chinese history and mecha science fiction for YA readers.
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain.
When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​
To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.
