Shelley Parker-Chan’s debut novel is equally breathtaking as it is devastating. "She Who Became the Sun," pitched as "Mulan" meets "The Song of Achilles", is a queer and lyrical reimagining of wartime romances, forbidden lust, antiheroes, and sacrifice due to personal gain. This multilayered and complex story follows the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, and the famine, plagues, peasant revolts that swept across China in the fourteenth century. In his place is Zhu Chongba, a Nanren girl born into hardship and poverty on the Huai River Plans of Southern Henan in 1345. After the rebels come close to taking her life at her heartless father’s sacrifice, Zhu flees to a monastery and takes over her brother’s identity in an attempt to escape her fated “nothingness."