Life of Bry

I am mad.

At myself.

I thought Foul Lady Fortune was a standalone spin-off. So imagine my surprise when I was met with one of the wildest cliff hangers I have ever come across. I was livid. 

Foul Lady Fortune by Chloe Gong picks up four years after the events of Our Violent Delights, following Rosalind Lang reborn into Fortune — a Nationalist assassin set on righting the wrongs of a girl long dead amidst a city and nation fractured. 

Gangs have been replaced with political factions pulling for power, and Gong cleverly spreads her characters throughout the turmoil. The secrecy of spying and the necessary layer of mistrust between these characters that are so different yet so connected in history and duty as they unwind another mystery tearing apart Shanghai and China is intricately told with Gong’s beautiful writing that brings the city itself alive. I adored the dynamic between Rosalind and Orion, the plot kept me thinking and turning around possibilities and the writing style is one I will truly never get over. It took some time to get into the story and sometimes it felt like Gong was trying too hard to parallel this spin-off to her previous books that it lost its nuance, but overall Foul Lady Fortune is an incredible sequel with a good balance of old and new. 

Rating: 4.2 poisoned hair pins out of 5

It’s been awhile since I sat down and wrote anything more than a quick review for a book. I was in a bit of a reading slump and then just decided to focus on reading without any of the extra things I usually do with it. But I loved this book, and there were some details of it I wanted to expand on especially with a sequel coming out in a few months (I like to hold onto these to refresh myself later). It felt right to pick back up this blog with this read.

So here are some of my thoughts on Foul Lady Fortune:

• The change in Rosalind is immaculate. Gong hits us with it immediately by starting this story off with Fortune in the midst of an assassination. While there is still a level of self doubt in her head, Rosalind is focused, determined and strong. She is not a pretty face on a stage complicit in the world around her. She is the main player. It was such a different look.
  Gong makes this change through the allusion of rebirth. Rosalind dies and Fortune/Janie Mead is born through the serum that made her immortal/invincible. It gives Rosalind a shot at righting her wrongs because she sees herself as something more, something useful. She can hunt down White Flowers and try to ease her conscience; however, she can’t really get that official closure because she’s physically stunted. We as readers see her growth and she can see the changes to the world around her, but she still sees the girl that allowed a man she thought loved her to tear apart her city and family. It adds a human touch to Rosalind after she becomes something more than human with her role as Fortune, which also ropes into the humanity of Orion down the line when the secret is revealed. 
  Throughout the book, I kept thinking about how Roma once turned a blind eye to seeing Rosalind in White Flower territory because he saw her as harmless. She can no longer be overlooked.

• There’s something poetic about Rosalind’s weapon of choice being poison — the one thing that can kill her. It’s like she wants to be well-acquainted with it, to know her weakness fully and to wield it without fear. However, it’s also such a good weapon for Rosalind because it’s far less personal. You don’t even have to touch a person to poison them. It’s clean. It’s dangerous without a warning. Unsuspecting. Much like Rosalind. It allows her to get her revenge without getting literal blood on her hands — though she’s still quite capable of that. 
  I liked that the poison aspect allowed for parts of the “old” Rosalind to exist. She was never one for violence. That doesn’t change. She doesn’t get a sick thrill out of her work. It’s all about her personal retribution. She feels as if she owes this to Juliette.

• I truly adored Rosalind and Orion’s dynamic from the start. In hindsight, Orion’s soft nature should’ve been a tell-tell sign of him being something a bit sinister — innocently sinister? But I really did love just how soft Orion was and how it complimented Rosalind’s coldness. It added warmth back into her life, which is what she needed at that time. She needed to be shown she was still worthy of warmth. Of love. And Rosalind’s focus/dedication is something Orion needed, as well, after sort of floating through life. He needed to be centered. They both needed to have more to fight for.
  “She had no place to say that he wasn’t dedicated to a belief, but she did recognize something of herself in him.”
  And their banter was just A-plus. It really showed off their personalities away from their mission as High Tide.  Once again, it adds humanity to two people who had that humanity stripped of them against their will. 
  Just a side note, every time Orion called Rosalind “beloved”, I swooned. I loved that it started as this sarcastic thing from this unserious playboy and very quickly became genuine.

• I really wanted more of Oliver and Celia. They were much more aligned than Orion and Rosalind, because they clearly worked with each other longer. They had such good chemistry, and I found myself wondering more about them as a pair. Maybe with Orion M.I.A. in Book No. 2 Gong will explore those two more? I loved Celia in the original duology and I want MORE.
  Along the same line, I wanted more of the dynamic between Oliver and Orion. There’s so much tension between the two brothers, and it’s not really explored enough to make sense except knowing they’re on separate sides of both this political push and family dispute. I think a lot of my wanting stems from me already knowing so much about what happened between Celia and Rosalind. We had two books to learn their dynamic, but we don’t have that same connection with Orion and Oliver so I wanted more to fill the void. Once again, there’s another book so maybe this itch will be scratched when it comes out.
• Just this: Celia and Rosalind as two women incredibly afraid of love the power it has over people and Oliver and Orion as two men who want nothing more than to love despite everything.

• The thing about Gong’s writing that I find so unique to her and am positively obsessed with is how she makes the setting a character. So often the setting is just that: the setting. It’s the board on which our pieces move. Gong makes the setting its own piece. The characters interact with the setting rather than in the setting. That’s partially due to the political factors. The plot centers around characters fighting (and spying) for their nation and families in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons that have landed them on opposite sides. That automatically pulls Shanghai and China as a whole into the equation — a constant pressure that increases each time a character looks around them. It adds intensity because the plot never rests. It’s all-encompassing. It’s honestly magic.

• The plot itself was so good! I don’t have too much to say, except I think Gong got better at laying out the mystery. I figured out everything in TVD pretty early on — though it did not affect my enjoyment while reading. This time around, I was literally dumbstruck with every reveal and was kicking myself for not figuring it out because the clues were always there. I also thought it was such a cool contrast to see these characters work within the confines of a government/organization with rules, oaths and ethics compared to the lawlessness of the gangs in the original duology. It presents a whole new challenge. 

• Here was my biggest issue with Foul Lady Fortune, and it’s very much based on personal preference. The parallels between this book and These Violent Delights became too forced and made me internally scream, “Do something different!” Gong caught lightning in a bottle with TVD and I understand wanting to recapture that same aura in a spin-off, but it didn’t need to be so similar. 
  At first, I thought it was so clever and made a point that even though Roma and Juliette sacrificed themselves, it didn’t heal the city. The gangs in Shanghai weren’t the only issue, so swapping the White Flowers and Scarlett Gang with Nationalists, Communists and Imperialists showed there was more at play. There’s still work to do, and it’s bigger than one or two people.
  However, then we got all the same players and some of the same plots. An annoying little sister who’s more capable than she looks? A protective older brother to go with it? Siblings with stark differences in world view? Two people who are weapons on opposite sides of a feud? A science experiment used to terrorize the city? 
  I’ve seen this before.
  Gong is such a good writer that I don’t think she needed to lean so heavily on her past work, even though this is a spin-off. You can still make a spin-off entirely unique. 
  But like I said, this is all a very personal preference thing. I don’t knock the book for it. I still loved it so much and cannot wait for Foul Heart Huntsman to come out in September.