There have been some absolutely shatteringly good debut novels lately, and R.F. Kuang's "The Poppy War" is definitely among them. A dense YA fantasy that steers an orphan fighting against her humble origins and the status quo bildungsroman into a war story, with a protagonist who never fully escapes the isolation of her situation and a political landscape partially inspired by Kuang's studies of modern Chinese history, including the Sino-Japanese wars, the pull quotes make me think the book was not marketed in a way that represented its contents.
But I can't say I object to readers in the YA demographic being drawn into a book that culminates in a protagonist who does some very ugly things, the horrors of which Kuang does not handwave.
This is the first book since I started talking about what I was reading on the internet again that contained passages I found beautifully written and intense and I censored myself from sharing because of the contents. When Kuang evokes the violence of the history she's studied, she does not pull any punches and you feel it deep in your gut.