PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksFrom this surface-level summary, Rin’s character may seem unsympathetic. Yet she is developed in such a way that the reader identifies with her, roots for her, believes that, although she is misguided and makes repeated mistakes, she is driving toward the good. Rin was the reason I felt compelled to keep reading, despite the trilogy’s sometimes gratuitous violence. I wanted Rin to come out, if not fully healed, then at least whole, despite the author’s clear message that no one wins in war ... What is at once tragic and yet compelling about the trilogy is that Rin’s path to destruction is not due to some inherent wickedness. Instead, she could be any one of us ... There are no easy answers here, neither in history nor in fiction. There comes a time in The Poppy War trilogy when Rin commits an indisputably atrocious act. The reader is left reeling. I’ve heard some readers say they felt heartbroken, felt it was a breach of trust with her character. For my part, I felt a kind of kinship with Rin. There was something familiar about her instinctive compulsion to rationalize her behavior, to root it in anger, because at least anger, in its sheer ferocity, can be mind-numbing. I understood that her rage was born from a sense of betrayal, from being lied to all your life, from realizing that the system you had tried so hard to master was in fact against you.
