Empress by Shan Sa
Empress is about Empress Wu, the 7th century woman who rose from humble backgrounds to rule China and eventually become the first female emperor. Sa’s recreation of 7th century China is very engrossing, but the book mostly reads as if Sa had originally intended to write a nonfiction book, and changed it at the last minutes to fiction. By adding a lot of sex scenes.
I’m not very familiar with Empress Wu, so I don’t know how it holds up to the publisher’s claims to this being a more sympathetic portrayal of her than most. If so, I suspect the typical portrayal to be rather nightmarish. Wu is ambitious and ruthless, as anyone would have to be to achieve what she did, but I also found her to be very hateful, and her near obsessive need to control the lives-especially the sex lives-of everyone around her made her a difficult character to read about, not to mention her physical, sexual and psychological abuse of others, which was largely centered on women
The world Sa recreates and the society she presents are very interesting and involving, but the characterizations of Empress Wu herself-along with the absence of any really likable characters- kept me from enjoying it as much as I wanted to.