Reading the Poppy War trilogy felt like reading morbid wikipedia articles when I was a kid. I don't mean it in a bad way, but after a certain point you just sort of detach yourself a bit from the subject matter. That's not to say the books weren't good. They were. The prose got the job done without belabouring the point or being too brief. The ending was properly cathartic. I don't think I'd read it again. Reading Rin's arc was like compulsively poking at an old hurt, over and over, getting it good and inflamed again, because she just keeps getting angrier and angrier.

That was part of what made the Poppy War so readable, actually - I wanted to see the lengths to which Rin would go to accomplish her goals, i.e. what her wheel-o-war-crimes would stop on next, which of her friends she might steamroll over next.  

I would have liked to see more of the consequences to her conquest in The Burning God. The novel gets into it a bit, with regards to the famine, the fractured geopolitics, and how the cleanup never ends. But I found those chapters to be perhaps too subdued in comparison to the batshit insanity that precedes and follows it. 

On the other hand, my favourite sequence in the entire book takes place during that cleanup period. There's a bit in Chapter 32 where Rin and her friends fantasize about all the things that they can do now that they've dismantled the feudal aristocracy in the midst of a famine. Their reforms range from practical to completely frivolous, and it's one of the only points in the entire book where their relative youth and pre-war identifies are visible, and where they're actually happy - and then they wake up in the morning, having to face the food shortages and assassins and arsonists anew. 

3/5.