Rachel Coleman

1. The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang
2. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
3. A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

I read all three of these recently and highly recommend them. They're all big bricks (metaphorically; I had The Water Outlaws in eaudio and the other two in ebook, all from the library) with multiple viewpoints and complicated plots and so. many. women. Also quite a lot of violent battle and gore and death, I guess.

The Water Outlaws is a wuxia story, with very much the feel of a big martial arts movie, complete with spectacular fight scenes and impossible magical abilities. Lin Chong is an arms instructor who gets falsely accused of a crime, which sets her on a path towards joining a band of rebellious outlaws, just as they are making a shift from criminality to challenging the cruelty of the imperial elite. Meanwhile, one of her former pupils finds herself running a dangerous research project into a super weapon on behalf of that same elite. Only after I'd finished the book did I read skygiants's review, in which I discovered that it is a gender-flipped retelling of Water Margin, a very influential Chinese novel written sometime before 1524. Most (but not all) of the characters are women, some of them are definitely queer, and there is a whole range of moral ambiguity, although Lin Chong does her best to hold to her sense of right and wrong throughout.

The Priory of the Orange Tree has magic and dragons (fire type and water type), impending worldwide doom, prophecy, fate, queer romance, magical non-dragon creatures, and a large cast of viewpoint characters, some more sympathetic than others. A Day of Fallen Night is set in the same world, about 500 years earlier, with an entirely different large cast of viewpoint characters. I don't think the second book needs you to have read the first, but there's definitely some things that will make more sense, or have more depth, when you have.