🇺🇸 What happens when The Handmaid’s Tale meets Pacific rim? The Iron Widow is born as a sci-fi retelling of the story of the only female emperor of Chinese history. It is really difficult in 2021 to find a young adult fantasy that is well written and deals with interesting topics, and, above all, it does so in a non-trivial way. The Iron Widow is all of this and something more.

🇺🇸️ The most common story told in the literature is the one between two persons of opposite groups that should hate each other but end up loving each other. This is the kind of love that must fight against everyone and everything (most of the time even the prejudice of the lovers itself) and could end really tragically (Romeo and Juliet’s story affected more than one generation) or really beautifully (like Kestrel and Arien in the Winner’s Curse trilogy. I thought that The Wolf and the Woodsman was another love story of this kind, but I ended up being utterly wrong.

🇺🇸️ This is my first English review of a book. Why have I decided to switch language for this review instead of my classic Italian? No particular reason really, I was just so frustrated after reading the book that I thought English readers could be the right audience to complain together about it. Will I switch completely to English as the language of the blog? No, definitely no. I still think my potential (if it exists) is the best express in Italian. Will I write other reviews in English? Yes, probably. Regardless of my origin, I live in the US now and all the books that I read are in English. Still, be gentle, because I am not a native English speaker or writer (Seneca would say that to err is human).