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thetypedwriter · 1 year

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Foul Lady Fortune Book Review

Foul Lady Fortune Book Review by Chloe Gong

This book was torturously tedious and achingly long.

I had high hopes for Chloe Gong. These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends, while not without problems, was a really excellent debut duology that made me excited for Gong’s upcoming works.

When I heard that Foul Lady Fortune, Gong’s third book, was actually a spin-off from her original duology that followed Rosalind Lang, a side character from the first books, I wasn’t enthused, but also not put-off. I trusted Chloe.

While I would have loved to have seen something new from her, I understand working off the success already gained from These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends.

It made sense. Even if, as a reader, I wasn’t hugely anticipatory.

Turns out that Gong should have left her duology alone.

Foul Lady Fortune takes place five years after the ending of the duology and sets readers back into the convoluted mess that is Shanghai. While Gong’s descriptions of Shanghai are fascinating to read about, they were swallowed up by a political quagmire, Gong’s thousands of characters, and nonsensical plot lines.

This book was 500+ pages of too many things that weren’t fleshed out properly in any sense. The politics of the book were beyond confusing, adding information and exposition that truly wasn’t needed for any other part of the book.

I felt stupid 99% of the time while reading about the different factions like the Communists or the Nationalists or the Japanese Imperial Army before deciding that it didn’t matter.

No, truly.

Understanding any of the politics that Gong writes into every chapter is completely pointless. Even the characters themselves didn’t care. Despite being part of a particular group, none of Gong’s characters had strong ties or allegiances to any one side, which makes the reader also not care about any of the sides and drives any tension and stakes the book created straight to the grave.

In fact, most of the characters actively worked together despite being on different sides of the war, and more than one character was a double agent or even a triple agent. Keeping track of who worked for who and what they believed in was a waste of time as the characters didn’t even make a priority.

Speaking of characters, they range from shafted and underdeveloped to bland and mediocre. I found Rosalind to be a middling protagonist. I didn’t hate her, but I also didn’t love her.

I felt very neutral about her journey and the myriad chapters in her POV. Seeing as most of the book was from her eyes, feeling neutral for 80% of the book isn’t great.

In addition, Rosalind is supposed to be this highly trained agent and yet she messes up almost every other chapter. Sometimes she knows how to fight and sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes she’s cool, calm, and collected, and other times she gives into nerves and anger. She doesn’t come across as highly trained in any sense.

Her whole emotional development about giving up on love and closing herself off from the world could have been interesting if we had seen more of it since Our Violent Ends.

However, because of the time skip, Rosalind has already processed most of what had previously happened with Dimitri and the Scarlet Gang, leaving her journey uninteresting to the reader.

Lastly, Rosalind is immortal. Yup, you heard me correctly. She can get shot in the stomach or poisoned and be just dandy. Because of this, the book has no stakes whatsoever. In every single fight scene featuring Rosalind, I was bored out of my skull because no matter the outcome, Rosalind would be fine.

That was established in chapter one. What is the purpose of this, you might ask? Does Rosalind grapple emotionally and mentally with the prospect of never dying, losing all of her loved ones, not aging, not sleeping, and falling into a pit of boredom and despair?

Who knows. Rosalind hardly thinks about her own immortality and all the ramifications that come with it, which would have been great as a reader to see as well as offer a complex insight into her character.

Some might argue that the purpose of her immortality is to lead into the chemical killings sub-plot, but I would argue that Rosalind’s immortality doesn’t add anything to the sub plot, and, if anything, lessens the stakes and tension overall as I mentioned above because you know she won’t die and will escape every altercation unscathed. Sigh.

Other major characters include Orion, Oliver, Celia, and Alisa. There are a thousand more that Gong introduces in this novel that don’t matter at all. At all at all. Every time she introduced some side character, I actively glossed over their name as I knew they were inconsequential.

Orion and Oliver are brothers and essentially carbon copies of each other. They’re both cookie-cutter agent types whose only personality traits include being handsome and sarcastic.

Celia is interesting, but we hardly get any chapters about her. Alisa is…fine. I think Gong exaggerates her skills and it annoyed me that Alisa was working for Rosalind and company in the first place, as politically and historically it made no sense.

Speaking once again about tension and stakes, Alisa is essentially a ninja ghost who can get out of any situation. Oh, the characters are imprisoned for the second time? Not to worry, Alisa will single handedly break into the jail and get them out. How? Shrugs. Don’t worry about it. Rinse and repeat multiple times.

Two other characters I’ll briefly mention are Phoebe and Silas. I found both insignificant until the epilogue where Gong reveals a twist that I didn’t find surprising at all. Otherwise, both of them essentially played no role and took up valuable page space for no discernible reason.

The plot itself was both dull and ludicrous at the same time. Most of this 500+ paged novel is having the characters complete boring tasks interspersed with low-stakes action. For example, Orion and Rosalind work at a Japanese newspaper named Seagreen Press. What do they do there? Who knows.

Other than Gong introducing us to more faceless characters, I found these chapters of them “working” completely pointless as they never actually did any work to cover up the fact that they were agents on a mission to infiltrate the Japanese.

Of all the places Gong could have chosen for her setting, she chose a newsroom? Baffling.

Predictably, every chapter would start with either some boring reconnaissance, some info dump on convoluted and removed politics, some half-hearted romance, and then an action scene of some sort that always involved our main characters getting away scot-free.

Over and over and over again.

Honestly, the best part about this book was probably the half-hearted romance. Everything else either didn’t matter or was too confusing to understand. Now, this book was apparently advertised as an enemies-to-lovers trope, as well as a fake married spy couple trope, as well as representing a range of sexuality types with Orion being bisexual and Rosalind being demisexual.

That’s a lot to unpack right there. I usually love enemies-to-lovers, but I would argue that they’re not enemies to lovers. Rosalind is cold and shut off from everyone, not just Orion, and they’re not enemies. They’re partners working on the same mission.

The animosity between them lasts only a short bit until suddenly Orion is calling her beloved every two goddamn seconds and they’re being affectionate without a care in the world.

The we’re-in-a-sham-marriage-and-then-accidentally-fell-in-love trope is so overdone and washed up that I couldn't even scrounge up an ounce of an enthusiasm for it. Of course they would fall in love. Duh. It would have been more interesting if Gong had inverted this trope somehow, but she just…didn’t.

The sexuality representation was actually a surprise to me. I had no idea that this book was even marketed this way until I started reading other people’s reviews. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, to back up this representation while actually reading the novel if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

Rosalind has maybe one internal monologue that she’s not like other people in terms of she doesn’t lust after others until she gets to know them more. Ummm, okay. There are a lot of people who don’t identify as demisexual and still feel that way.

Orion being bisexual (apparently) is painful. There’s one conversation where his sister Phoebe mentions him sleeping with a man. That’s it. That’s the whole representation of Orion being bisexual in the entire novel.

If I were a reader who had been taken in by how it was advertised I would be beyond disappointed. Gong doesn’t deliver whatsoever on the representation and it shows. If anything, it seems more like a marketing ploy than an actual attempt to represent different kinds of people.

Adding all these elements together, this book was a slog. Gong’s writing itself was fine to me, not particularly enchanting nor distracting. As always, her love for Shanghai and the culture surrounding it was the best part.

Everything else about the novel put me off and made me not want to read. This book would get a worse score than it did, but I still think Gong has talent and I appreciate her attempt involving complicated historical issues and POC characters.

I just wish it was done better.

Recommendation: This book is lauded as a historical remake of As You Like It. As I didn’t like most of the book, I’d recommend going to the source itself and reading Shakespeare's play. Not only does it take less time, but ironically you’d be less confused and happier all around.

Score: 5/10

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