Below is a review I posted on my tumblr, but the long and the short of the review is... buy it on amazon here and excitingly its currently being discounted so you can get a kindle copy for 0.99$!
Yellow Sky Revolt is a new Three Kingdoms novel that the author has self-published.
It is the first in a 10 book series that follows the life of Liao Hua, who Romance of the Three Kingdoms has involved in both the Yellow Turban campaign & the fall of Shu-Han.
The cover looks lovely, attention and care has been spent to make it look like a quality product. The author has done the same with the text itself. Self-published work will rarely have the same high quality finish of traditional publishing as it doesn’t get looked over by a professional editor. That is true for this book too, but it is certainly one of the best attempts I’ve seen made by a self published author.
He writes in a first person style recounting Liao Hua’s life in a way that is clearly influenced by Bernard Cornwall’s Saxon Chronicles or the King Arthur trilogy. Those are my all time favourite historical fiction series’, so I really enjoyed the style.
The author has done his research, but his work is clearly heavily influenced by the novel. The battles follow the novel pattern. For example, Liu Bei & brothers show up in Yellow Turban battles they were nowhere near in actual history & fights tend to have a duel before they commence.
However, he acknowledges that he has deviated from history in his historical note. Ultimately historical fiction is about telling a good tale first of all and sometimes history has to bend to that and so his stylistic choice has been to largely use the novel’s version of events. That isn’t how I or the-archlich have been writing, but I it is certainly a valid choice. ROTK has been the most popular telling of the history for several decades and no-one can dispute it is a compelling tale of the era.
All in all, its an excellent novel and I would recommend reading it.
