Review: She Who Became the Sun is an important entry in the LGBTQ fantasy canon Eliot Schrefer
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Two starving children are orphaned by bandits in 1345 Mongol-ruled China in Shelley Parker-Chan s She Who Became the Sun (Tor, 416 pp., ★★★½ out of four). The brother, Zhu Chongba, is the supposedly lucky eighth-born child, but he soon dies. It is his nameless sister, with “none of the roundness that makes children adorable,” who survives their ordeal.
She assumes her brother’s identity – down to his very name and male gender – and enters a monastery in his stead. Over the course of this ambitious, sweeping novel, Zhu works her way into positions of greater power, until control of all of China is within her grasp.