Hi, everyone! Today we have something a little different–assistant-editor Filip made his recent debut on BookTube, with a discussion of what makes The Burning God a brilliant anti-war novel masking as military fantasy.

Here’s a little taste of what the video has to offer:

This is military fantasy at its most intricate. Kuang captures better than almost anyone I’ve read the human cost of war. She juxtaposes strategic and tactical expediency with the horrors they give birth to—creating in the process as powerful a critique of war as I have ever come across. It was evident from the first part of the trilogy, the author is not one to shy away from the brutal and ugly nature of warfare–so much of these novels is drawn from well-documented war horrors, many of them from the Sino-Japanese War; I don’t think I’ll ever forget the haunting descriptive passages of Golyn Niis, a slaughter whose brutality recalls the Nanking Massacre—more about which you can find in The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang.

If you prefer reading to video, Filip also posted a review of Rebecca Kuang’s masterful finale of The Poppy War last month, which you can find here.

He also wrote all of this, and now feels a little weird about using the third person to describe himself so extensively.