However, lapses in worldbuilding and characters’ relationships result in some events feeling random and forced. The action-packed plot, involving battles both physical and mental, is original and incorporates queer themes and Zetian’s unwavering, cathartic feminism. Things become complicated when her forbidden love interest, wealthy, protective Yizhi, gets involved. When she is paired with Li Shimin, a pilot and murderer with powerful qi, she must be strategic to survive the war and take down the patriarchy. She proclaims herself the nightmare these careless, selfishly ambitious boy pilots deserve to face.

Bent on revenge, Zetian, a frontier girl who chafes at the idea of rigid gender roles and imagines the freedom of “giving onlookers no easy way to bind me with a simple label,” voluntarily becomes a concubine-pilot. This sacrificial attitude toward females results in the death of narrator Zetian’s older sister. The female concubine-pilot typically dies in the battle, having been entirely drained of her qi. In response, humans have built Chrysalises, war machines that take the shape of mythical animals and are powered by the qi of two pilots, one bringing the female yin force and the other the male yang. These giant buglike aliens fly and attack with frightening power. In Huaxia, a Chinese-influenced futuristic society, humankind is in a constant war with the Hunduns. An individual vendetta fuels a systemic challenge in a war-torn world.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao