The Grace of Kings is going to be a difficult book to review. On one hand this book was a diverse representation in a genre (high fantasy) that doesn't see much diversity in it. It is an ambitious debut fantasy by Kevin Lu, a Chinese-American author known for his award winning short stories in the book The Paper Menagerie. It is a book that steeped in Chinese mythology and lore that packs a punch and sets my epic fantasy heart soaring. On the other though, it suffers from some aspects that brought down the book from being excellent to have a frustrating element to it. 
 This book would be characterized as fantasy but not in the "magic and sorcery" type of fantasy. Liu took inspiration from Chinese lore and I think that expands to the way that he tells the story in The Grace of Kings. There are gods that rule over the islands of Dara but a long standing pact have tied their hands on directly impacting the humans of the world. So - do the gods just leave mortals alone? No, they comment on the behavior of Dara and sometimes even make suggestions directly to those they way. I loved that I could see the aspects of the Chinese culture peeking through. Liu's writing style was flawless. To have a 600 page book be the right mix of readable and engaging takes skill and it does not surprise me that his short stories have been award winners! 
 With that being said, there were a few things that knocked off my true enjoyment of this book. The first of those things was the simple fact that this book was a plot driven book. I fought a lot with this and the fact that plot driven books tend to have a lot of telling instead of showing that did not lead to as much character development as I appreciate in books. We were told that "x did this, this is why he did x" and so on and so forth. During the last half of the book it got particularly difficult because they were focusing on battles and the characters development seemed to be put on the back burner. 
 To caveat the idea of telling instead of showing, my second issue with this book was the lack of females in this book. I know that this has been mentioned in other reviews, but the sheer gravity of this shocked me. In this book there were four or five female characters and for the most part they are overshadowed by men. I feel that sometimes when people make stories either based in a historical time period or inspired by one, one of the first people to suffer are women. It doesn't matter with what culture a common theme throughout history is the repression and misrepresentation of women. I think that this is where this book fails the hardest. While the male characters had chapters and chapters (even minor characters) to flush out why and how they did things the women barely got 10 chapters in the entire book and many of those were drowned out by the men and the plot pertaining to them. 
 Despite this, I believe that the issues towards the women in the story has been addressed by the author and as much as the things that I said I didn't like I still thoroughly enjoyed this story and will continue with the series and pick up The Paper Menagerie!