I wasn't aware of S.L. Huang's The Water Outlaws before it appeared on the Ignyte ballot, which is surprising given that it's been shortlisted for a ton of other awards including the Nebula. Once I read what it was about, though, I was very excited to read it. I'm a big fan of wuxia films but haven't read any of the fiction that those films draw from, and a retelling of one of the most famous of those stories really appealed to me. 

I really enjoyed this, but I felt like it never really lived up to the promise of the opening chapters, which for me were the strongest part of the book. Our introduction to Lin Chong presents us with an incredibly strong character who's a master of her art, and treats us to some really exciting, cinematic combat as she trains a group of soldiers recruited into the Imperial army. Thirty pages in I was already telling friends that they were going to love this book and that they should read it. Everything leading up to the point where Lin Chong escapes the guards Gao Qiu has ordered to kill her and goes on the run is fantastic, and if the book had continued at that level it would have easily been one of my favourites of the year.

Unfortunately from that point on it started to flounder a little bit. It's never bad, by any stretch, but it loses some of the magic of the opening. The middle section feels fairly bloated, as we cut back and forth between Imperial experiments to develop a new form of god's tooth (the vessels that channel magic in this world) and the Liangshan Bandits doing bandit things. It's always well written, but thinking back on it now I struggle to remember any real specifics about much of what happened in the middle of the book aside from a couple of standout moments. There's a really great sequence late in the middle section of the novel where one of the bandits unleashes hundreds of ghosts sealed beneath a village onto the Imperial army massacring the residents, but it's over far too quickly and is simply never mentioned again.

As slow as it may be, one thing the middle section does very well is establishing that our "heroes" are not especially nice people. They may have a just cause, but there's very much a reason they exist outside of society. In one particularly gruesome section we see a group of the bandits torture and eat a man who has betrayed them to the Empire over the course of a night. I really liked the fact that Huang makes no attempt to sugar coat this sort of thing. Her heroes are villains, too - they're just not as villainous as the agents of the Empire who they're in opposition to.

Things do pick up again at the end as the Imperial army lay siege to the bandits, but the action is never quite as good as that first fight scene on the training ground. And given that vengeance is such a strong theme throughout the book - see the aforementioned eating of a peasant as just one example of that - it was a little disappointing that Lin Chong never really gets to have her final confrontation with Gao Qiu, the man who put her in this situation in the first place. She does face him, right at the end, but rather than the fluid wuxia combat we've been building to for the whole book it's more of a desperate scramble for Lin Chong to protect her friends and weather the storm of Gao Qiu's new-found power rather than an actual confrontation. She makes the observation that the only way to defeat him is to stop fighting, but thematically this didn't really land for me and it left me feeling a little unsatisfied with the ending.

Everything about the world was fascinating and I especially really loved the gods teeth and the way that magic was represented. There's a really strong mythic tone running throughout, and I enjoyed spending time with the cast. I just wish it had been a little more focused through the middle, and I felt like it never quite managed to recapture the magic of a very strong opening.