A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Foul Heart Huntsman
Chloe Gong
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers for pretty much the entire series. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
Rosalind stared at him. Then she smacked her palm onto his chest – not enough to hurt him, but certainly enough to berate him.
“Why,” she demanded, “are you like this? I was so worried. What’s wrong with you?”
Orion grabbed her hand, holding her down before she could try to smack him a second time. “I love you too.”
That’s it. That’s the series. I love it.
Here endeth the first – to the best of my knowledge – romance series I have genuinely loved with my whole heart and soul, and it’s a bittersweet feeling. I’m glad it’s not getting dragged out into twenty books, which would very certainly give the premise, the world, and the Scientific Sillies more than enough time to grow stale past the point of enjoyment; but also I can see myself revisiting this series again and again and again, because I love these characters so much. I have taken a do-we-really-have-to attitude towards the romantic storylines in other books, but this is the only series that has gotten me to ship every couple, and to be honest I still don’t know how it did it. This is high praise indeed, and it’s only going to get better.
After an action-packed 1931, 1932 opens with Shalin “Rosalind” Lang moping around her apartment without the cheerful presence of Liwen “Orion” Hong (unwanted mission partner, unexpected love of her life, currently brainwashed, all-around pest). Having healed with her usual supernatural speed after the fight with her prospective mother-in-law, Rosalind is currently at loose ends and trying to figure out her next steps. Unbeknownst to her, her Nationalist superiors leaked her identity to the press in order to force her into an early retirement, which means she is also hounded by aggressive reporters who can and will stone her if it gets them a photo op. Outside of her bubble, the country is approaching open warfare at the speed of light: the Japanese have been ramping up their aggression, and their activities go completely unchecked by other foreign powers, who will only intervene if their own citizens are harmed on Chinese soil. Despite the Nationalists’ best efforts to decommission her, Rosalind manages to get around the publicity issue by convincing the higher-ups to send her on a national morale-boosting tour, arguing that the people will rally around a Chinese assassin best known for killing foreigners. Accompanied by the long-suffering Jiemin, she sets out with the goal of luring Lady Hong within Orion-snatching distance. Elsewhere, Communist operatives Selin “Celia” Lang and Lifu “Oliver” Hong learn about Rosalind’s tour and quietly tail her, intending to take Orion for themselves if and when he makes an appearance.
The plan succeeds with suspicious ease (to all of their surprise) when Lady Hong unexpectedly abandons Orion in the middle of battle, letting Rosalind take charge of him with substantial help from Alisa Montagova while Celia and Oliver provide a timely diversion. Though Lady Hong seemingly retreats after Rosalind manages to sedate Orion, the fight still leaves Rosalind with a badly poisoned wound. Following Celia’s advice, she and Alisa try to take refuge in the town of Zhouzhuang, only to find themselves relentlessly pursued by Lady Hong’s steroid-enhanced soldiers. Their second lucky break comes when their pursuers are slaughtered by a masked couple, who then reveal themselves as the now-married, not-actually-dead Roma and Juliette Montagov(a). (Rosalind faints. This is more from the blood loss than the shock, though the shock sure doesn’t help.) Unfortunately, Lady Hong’s experiments have taken their toll, and Orion wakes up with no memory of Rosalind, though he is still an absolute pest. Lacking any better options, Roma and Juliette send Benedikt Montagov and Marshall Seo to retrieve the runaway Lourens Van Dijk from Vladivostok. This is done with the expectation that Rosalind and co. will still be around in a week, which is roughly the time the retrieval mission is estimated to take, but their time runs out when Celia arrives in Zhouzhuang with the news that Oliver was abducted by Lady Hong.
Meanwhile, triple-agent Xielian “Silas” Wu becomes obsessed with finding and capturing and/or enlisting Communist assassin Priest despite the increasing ire of Feiyi “Phoebe” Hong, his best friend and longtime crush. Phoebe’s irritation is largely interpreted as jealousy but is actually anxiety, given that she is Priest, while Silas remains convinced that Priest is the key to rescuing Orion from his mother’s clutches. Phoebe’s attempts to lay a false trail prove ineffective, as do her repeated assertions that Priest cannot help them. The truth finally comes to light during a risky rescue operation, during which Oliver is successfully retrieved but Phoebe is cornered and captured by Nationalists. Silas’s triumph turns to horrified shock when he learns that Phoebe is Priest, causing both of them to question their entire relationship. The situation is not helped when Phoebe learns that Silas joined forces with her mother, and that he traded Oliver for Orion. This sounds bad, but Silas later breaks Phoebe out of prison, taking advantage of a Japanese attack. During the escape, he reveals that he mixed his own blood with the samples taken from Oliver, effectively destroying Lady Hong’s most recent experiments. With their greatest misunderstanding more or less resolved, Phoebe and Silas finally cement their will-they-won’t-they romance before Phoebe makes her way into the beleaguered city, where she takes up arms against the invading Japanese.
While Phoebe and Silas find their way back to Go, Rosalind and Celia set out to heal their respective Hong boys: Celia takes the blood-drained Oliver to a hospital for treatment; Rosalind smuggles Orion out of the city and makes for Zhouzhuang, just barely making it in time to rendezvous with Benedikt, Marshall, and Lourens. The morally ambiguous Lourens does manage to restore Orion’s memory, but his joyful reunion with Rosalind is cut short by Lourens’s bland announcement that Rosalind – granted so-called immortality through faulty methodology – will actually die within the next few years, and that the only way to save her is to give her full immortality (along the lines of what Orion unwillingly received from his mother) before curing her completely. Rosalind receives this philosophically; Orion is livid. With nothing else for it, Rosalind and Orion head back into the war-torn city. Roma and Juliette fully intend to accompany them, but Rosalind drugs them on her way out the door, wanting to keep them relatively safe. This is not, of course, enough to keep them completely out of the action: they have a long reach, and they still manage to send in reinforcements before all is lost.
All paths re-intersect in a bloody melee, which ends with Lady Hong’s arrest by the Nationalists. Alisa steals the cure from Lady Hong’s lab, and the gang gets out mostly unscathed, except for Orion, who is attacked and almost mortally wounded by Mr. Akiyama, Lady Hong’s erstwhile boss and a real son of a bitch. (It’s okay. Phoebe blows his head off.) Both Lady Hong and Rosalind attempt to heal Orion by administering another dose of the serum that made him immortal, but he injects it into Rosalind instead, giving her true immortality shortly before the Nationalists arrive. After a desperate escape and a frenzied search for medical attention, Rosalind ends up dragging Orion to Lourens’s lab out of sheer desperation, and unexpectedly finds Lourens in residence. Finding that she cannot make herself bleed long enough to provide the transfusion Orion desperately needs, Rosalind takes the immortality cure stolen by Alisa, thus losing her ability to instantly heal, and all but forces Lourens to bring Orion back from the brink of death.
The rest is fairly obvious: Orion survives; Rosalind’s cure-laced blood cures him of his immortality as well, leaving them both completely human; Orion returns to the Nationalists in an administrative role, and Rosalind takes a job with Roma and Juliette’s underground arms empire. At the end of all things, Celia and Oliver announce their engagement while Juliette announces that she is expecting her first child, and Orion (unintentionally) upstages them all when he proposes to Rosalind via sky writing. In the mischievously sweet short story “In True Delights,” a little over a year after their engagement, Rosalind and Orion find their quiet August wedding nearly disrupted by blackmail, daffodils, and misunderstandings galore. Fortunately they invited Juliette, who clears up the blackmail problem the way only Juliette can, and all is well, though war still looms.
I’m not even going to talk about the terrible science this go-round, because I covered it in Our Violent Ends. Look, at this point it is what it is. I am not a scientist and I never will be, so if I know your science is bad, it’s really bad. Discussing it a second time is going to give me a headache, so I am choosing to call it the Scientific Sillies, and I am choosing to ignore it, the way I do every time I watch Jurassic World. The science isn’t the point of the series anyway; it is a plot device at best and a backdrop at worst. With that being said, Gong absolutely nails the actual point of the series, which is the characters and the messy relationships and the emotion and the despair and the love and the joy. And there is so much joy, even when the world is falling to shit and it seems like nothing will ever be right again. There is the joy of Celia and Oliver finally putting their feelings out in the open and coming out stronger because of it. There is the joy of Rosalind reuniting with Juliette, and Alisa with Roma, and finding that nothing has changed between them. There is the joy of Phoebe and Silas falling in love; the joy of Orion recovering his love for Rosalind; and, at the end, the joy of knowing that the series is over and everyone makes it except for maybe a dozen redshirts and Mr. Akiyama, may he burn in Hell. (And Dao Feng. I am sore about this one. I didn’t want him to die. He made me cry.) I don’t even feel bad that Lady Hong survives. I don’t like her and her journey is odd, but she has her softer side. At the same time, of course, I don’t know how much I buy into her supposed maternal instincts when she bred her own sons as lab rats and isn’t shy about admitting that fact.
Lady Hong aside, I love all of the characters so much, and I love their journeys. “In True Delights” was so satisfying to read, partly because it ties the series off definitively but also because everyone gets a happy ending and none of it feels forced. I adore Orion; I especially love him during the short story, when he grumps about Celia’s insistence on separate weddings until he realizes this gives him an excuse to buy more clothes. I love that he makes such a pest of himself that Juliette preemptively warns Roma not to leave him alone in a room with Marshall, who is also a pest. I almost shrieked when Orion revealed that Marshall hit on him once in a club, because he’s Marshall and of course he did. I love Rosalind even more, and I love the two of them together, even if it takes them a while to get there. It was so lovely to see how far back their relationship goes, all the way back to a Paris cinema and a bucket of popcorn. Yet out of all the romantic moments in all the world, nothing was sweeter or more on-brand than this most perfect union.
“Is it you?” Rosalind asked, though she knew, she’d known the second his arms came around her.
“I love you,” Orion said in lieu of a reply, in perfect replacement of any straightforward answer. “I love you, I love you, I’m sorry I said so many stupid things. I can’t believe I asked why we couldn’t cross the Suzhou Creek.”
I also appreciate that Orion is not the only person Rosalind cares about: she fights with equal ferocity for her sister and their cousin and all their friends, even if she’s only just recently met them. She complains about Dao Feng, both behind his back and to his face, but she loves him like a father and she grieves him when he is RUDE enough to DIE in FRONT OF HER, smh Dao Feng. He’s such a comparatively minor character, and yet I love him. If there was one aspect in which this series might have come up short, it was with the sheer size of the cast; but Gong is skilled in keeping each character fresh and memorable, and no one got left behind. There was never any moment in which I looked at, say, Lourens – not my favorite by any means, but memorable in his way – and asked him who the hell he was. I feel as if I could walk away from the series for a year or so and still remember every character almost perfectly. (Okay, maybe I’ll forget Mr. Akiyama. Again, fuck that guy.)
One final thought, which came to me when I was rereading my earlier review of Foul Lady Fortune to make sure I wasn’t repeating myself: Gong’s writing has improved dramatically over the course of the series, though her verb usage is no better than it was the last time I complained about it. Still, she has gotten better – she managed to get the “greeted” thing right on one page, that was a surprise – and there are places in this book specifically where her language soars. But one thing I didn’t quite realize until just now is that, with this final book, I didn’t feel like Gong was jerking me around the way she did in earlier books. Maybe I’m just getting better at predicting her the more I read her writing, but somehow I don’t think so. Everything had a place, and it all fell in line neatly. There were no left-field reveals, unbelievable survivals, little sisters turning out to be cold-blooded assassins, etc, etc. If it was maybe a smidgen too convenient or too easily predicted, I’m fine with that. I do not like wild plot twists for the sake of wild plot twists. I want everything to have a place and a purpose, and to the best of my recollection everything did.
I have to admit that I did struggle with the book in the beginning, but I’m more inclined to blame my bottomless catalogue of Personal ProblemsTM than I am to blame Gong. It took me longer to read the book than expected because I have been having one crisis after another, and my ability to read a sentence without immediately having to reread it several more times has been completely shot to hell. This certainly is not Gong’s fault, though the book does start out a little slow. But once it gets rolling it never stops, and it is so compulsively bingeable that I almost want to read the whole series all over again, starting with These Violent Delights. It isn’t perfect, but I wasn’t expecting it to be. It is sweet and funny and sassy and sad and joyful and absolutely everything in between, and it fucking slaps. It is one of my favorite series of all time. And it is enough.
