The Poppy War is R. F. Kuang's fantasy retelling of the Rape of Nanking. The book starts off like a typical fantasy novel set in an East Asian analog with western trappings --- there's an exam where the hero protagonist passes and qualifies to go to a military school. The class sizes are astonishingly small for being in China (the author went to a small East Coast private college), and there's one mysterious, weird teacher whose craziness is legendary.
The magic system is completely un-worked out and deliberately designed so that the author can do whatever she likes, but the writing is transparent and enjoyable, even if the whole setup is entire cliched. (It might not be so clichéd if you didn't grow up reading Jin Yong or Gu Long).
Once the novel gets to the war between the Japanese-analogue and the Chinese-analogue, the story drags, and none of the setup she put into place in the first third of the novel has a fulfilling ending. This happened because the world-building was incomplete, so the characters ended up being dragged along by the plot rather than leading to a natural conclusion that was part of the setup.
I can see why the book was popular and won awards. But I borrowed the second book of the trilogy from the library and didn't get very far before I understood that the fundamental world building flaws in the book meant that it wasn't compelling --- the need to retell the rape of Nanking simply over-rode all other considerations and it shows.
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