I was so excited for this book after loving Iron Widow and I have to say I was a little disappointed, but I didn't think this was a bad book and some of these may come from the fact that I didn't reread Iron Widow before jumping into this, so I'll get into the things I liked and the things that didn't work for me.

Things I enjoyed:
- I loved being back in the world with the Chrysalises and the fighting
- The Hundun and gods plots
- Good talk of consent, particulalry during intimate scenes (see below for discussion on why I'm not calling this smut scenes like others have)
- Women empowerment!!!

The things that didn't work for me:
- It felt slow through the middle and I don't necessarily automatically dislike slower pace but I kind of got bored through the middle.
- After wonderful character development in the first book, Zetian's character felt kind of stagnant during this book.
- The dynamic between Zetian and Qin Zheng didn't work for me and I didn't like how she kept saying "oh I can't do this because Qin Zheng won't allow it" over and over.
- Not enough Shimin.
- Took us too long to circle back around to the gods plotline, which was the plot that intrigued me the most.
- A lot of telling, not a much showing, which made some of the political points, whilst valid and I agree with them, seem heavy-handed at times.

There has been some discussion, at least in some spheres on social media, about the sex/intimate scenes in this book and whether or not they constitute smut, and I think this is mostly a factor of the publishing industry instead of the author. This book should definitely be considered New Adult. I don't think it's inappropriate for people in the middle to upper end traditional YA age range at all, as they are mostly quite vague, but I think that we need an expectation of the level of discussion of sex and extent of sex scenes in certain age range books so readers, particulalry younger readers, can be prepared with the level of these factors when to go into these books. I'm not saying teenagers shouldn't be reading these sex scenes, but the reader should be able to expect the level of these scenes going in, and given YA goes down to 12 years old, the scenes in this book could be too much for someone in the lower end (and I know it would've been a lot for me when I was deep into YA books). Like I said, I think this is a publishing thing and not necessarily this book, as the scenes were vague enough for the age range, in my opinion. I also wouldn't classify it as smut, as there was not much detail to the acts themselves, moreso the lead up. I don't know if they were completely necessary to the book, particulalry given I didn't feel the chemistry between the characters anyway, but that doesn't take away from these points above. MAKE NEW ADULT A THING!!!!

Anyway, I will still likely pick up the third book to see how this ends.