This book has been on my TBR list for a good… three years now? I bought it in Paris a few years ago, at Shakespeare & Company, and then proceeded to leave it on my bookshelf for 3 years because my TBR-list is scarily long and I don’t think I’ll ever get around to finishing it.
This December I got to experience the specific kind of brain fog that is created by spending all day every day correcting exams. (It’s great fun – no, really.) Ever the bookworm, I kept (trying to) read books – then swiftly discovered that I did not have the brain juices left to actually deal with books that offered more than a romance.
Don’t panic, though, because my newest hyperfixation is ice hockey, and the literary world saved me in the form of ice hockey romance books. However, by the time the end of the month rolled around I was craving a good fantasy book.
My conditions were as followed:
- a thrilling fantasy, the kind that has you in a chokehold until you’re finished,
- but without the heavy fantasy world-building because I didn’t have the brain power to actually enjoy that.
Thus, my psychic book sense made me pick up These Violent Delights.
(Okay, no. In all honesty: I ran out of good hockey romances to read so I started to read Chloe Gong instead. I’d like to rant about the lack of good hockey books lately, but I’ll keep that for another time.)
Anyway, back to These Violent Delights. This story is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette but without the (rather concerning) original ages of the main characters. Roma and Juliette are eighteen and nineteen – a much more sensible age to be involved in a forbidden romance if you’d ask me. On top of the whole Shakespeare-vibe, the book’s background is historically correct and there are monsters involved. Find me a better mix than this, I dare you. These Violent Delights is set in 1926 Shangai and features Roma Montagov and Juliette Cai as mean characters. They are both heirs to the two biggest gangs in Shangai – the Russian White Roses and the native Shanghainese Scarlet gang. There are some other important side characters, such as Benedikt and Marshall (Roma’s friends) and Kathleen and Rosalind (Juliette’s cousins).
The story itself is a whirlwind of intrigue, mysterious monsters and so. much. gore. Seriously. People are stabbing each other left and right, they’re shooting each other even more, and to top it all off Shangai is being plagued by a bloodthirsty monster. In between it all, Chloe Gong manages to create characters that are dynamic, emotional, and constantly growing. Juliette, maybe most of all, is the perfect proof of this. She’s not afraid to use her weapons and to draw unnecessary blood, and yet she is willing to die for her city and her people. Roma, then, is mysterious and haunted and really just a cute little puppy once you get past the first two adjectives. Marshall and Benedikt are my babies and no one is allowed to hurt them. Rosalind and Kathleen… they’re probably my favourite characters. I love them, really.
Besides the gripping fantasy, Chloe Gong adds layers to her story that bring her characters to life. No labels or terms are ever used, and yet the identity of each character is painstakingly clear through the way their emotions, thoughts, and actions bleed through the page.
And the best part: there’s a sequel – Our Violent Ends.
In case you still haven’t had enough of Secret Shangai and its inhabitants after the first two books (which you won’t, believe me), there’s a second duology called Lady Fortune and a collection of two short stories featuring some of my favourite gangsters.
(Disclaimer: after I finished this series I didn’t know what to do with my life for a good two days, because it was simply so good. You’ve been warned.)
