S.L. Huang's The Water Outlaws
I’ve seen this on a few best-of lists and it seemed intriguing, inspired by classic martial art stories and about a group of mostly-women bandits. And there were some very cool characters and some cinematic fight scenes, but I also thought it had some issues with pacing and didn’t service all of the characters well. The main characters are a woman martial arts instructor who's sentenced to prison bc a powerful asshole gets mad at her, but she escapes and joins the bandits, and her friend who somehow gets roped into a government scheme to make magical bombs (more or less) (that storyline dragged a lot). I really wished we'd gotten to see more of some of the other characters, particularly the enthusiastic monk/adopted sister. I will also say one of the plotlines involved a lot of torture and there’s some cannibalism for no real reason, so this was a little bit darker than I usually go for (also an attempted rape, if we're listing content warnings). An interesting story though. B+.
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