The Wife Comes First: Qi Wei Shang (Novel) Vol. 1 by Lv Ye Qian He: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

The Wife Comes First by Lv Ye Qian He

My first review of the year is a Chinese historical danmei by a new author to me, Lv Ye Qian He, who is very popular in China according to the back copy introduction. And her work turned out to be delightful, so hopefully there will be more books by her translated to English. 

Prince Cheng is the third prince, he and the second prince being by the empress, with the first prince being by a maid and the fourth prince by the empress consort. All this leads to a muddy succession and any one of them could become the next emperor. As the empress is dead, the empress consort pulls the strings. And she’s made it so that Prince Cheng has to marry a man to make him ineligible to become the emperor. Having male wives for this reason is very typical in the book’s world.

Prince Cheng rebels violently against this, treating his male wife badly and spending most of his life fighting wars. But the scheming empress consort isn’t satisfied and ten years later, Prince Cheng finds himself facing death, accused of many crimes, some of which are made up. And the only person by his side is his male wife, Mu Hanzhang. Moved by this loyalty by the very person who should hate him, he wishes at his death to make amends to him.

Prince Cheng is granted his wish and he finds himself returned to the morning after his wedding night with Mu Hanzhang. It’s inauspicious, because his anger had made him treat Mu Hanzhang very badly in bed and the wife is now very afraid of him. But he sets out to make things better. Armed with the knowledge of how things turned out, he teams with the second prince, who also had turned out to be more loyal in his first life than he’d realised before death. Together they work to remove the people who schemed against them, and to make sure Mu Hanzhang has a loving and supporting husband by his side.

This was a very well written, mostly plot-driven opening to an interesting story. The tone is fairly light, but not comical, and obstacles are relatively easily dealt with, but not so easily that the reader would lose interest. Both main characters are interesting and easy to root for.

There’s a lot of palace intrigue and scheming, not only against Prince Cheng but Mu Hanzhang too. The latter turns out to be a great asset to the prince, and little by little, Prince Cheng’s need to make amends turns into love. Mu Hanzhang takes more time to warm to him. But a war is inevitable. The volume ends as Prince Cheng prepares to leave, maybe for years. I’ll definitely read more.