These Violent Delights Review: Shanghai Wrecked Me

A Romeo and Juliet Retelling That Actually Understood the Assignment

I put off reading this one for almost two years because “Romeo and Juliet retelling” has been done to actual death, and I was so wrong to wait. Chloe Gong took the bones of the most overused source material in YA and built something that feels genuinely new: 1926 Shanghai, a city splitting along its foreign concessions, two rival gangs instead of two rival houses, and a monster stalking the streets that may or may not be the least dangerous thing in this book.

Juliette Cai Deserves Her Own Genre

Juliette is the reason this book works. She’s the heir to the Scarlet Gang, freshly back from four years in New York, and she walks into every room like she’s already won the argument. She is vicious, funny, deeply lonely under all the armor, and never once softened for likability. I’ve seen readers call her unlikable and I genuinely don’t understand the complaint — she’s supposed to make you nervous. Gong lets her be cruel when cruelty is the only tool available to a woman running a criminal empire in a country actively being carved up by foreign powers, and that context matters. This isn’t girlboss window dressing. The politics of colonialism and gang warfare are load-bearing, not decorative.

Roma, the Betrayal, and Why the Slow Burn Actually Burns

Roma Montagov could have been a paper-thin brooding love interest and instead he’s arguably more wounded than Juliette, carrying guilt she doesn’t fully know about and loyalty to a father who doesn’t deserve it. Their history is the classic enemies-to-lovers setup, except Gong resists the urge to rush the reunion. These two circle each other for most of the book, testing whether four years and one enormous betrayal can be walked back, and the tension holds because neither of them trusts the other or themselves. It’s a slow burn in the truest sense — not two people pretending not to like each other, but two people who have genuine, earned reasons not to.

Where the Pacing Actually Stumbles

Here’s my honest gripe: the middle third sags. The monster-hunting plot, which should be pulling the tension tight, instead gets shuffled offstage for long stretches while the gang politics take over, and the two threads don’t always feel like they’re talking to each other. I also think the ensemble — Juliette’s cousins, Roma’s inner circle — gets more page time than emotional payoff in this first book, which reads like setup debt for book two rather than a flaw exactly, but it does slow the momentum right when I wanted it to accelerate. The prose is gorgeous throughout, sometimes almost too ornate for its own pacing.

The Setting Is the Real Main Character

What elevates this above “Shakespeare but make it YA” is how specific and unsentimental the Shanghai setting is. Gong writes the international concessions, the class tension, the encroaching Kuomintang and Communist factions, and the everyday violence of a city under multiple occupations with a clarity that never feels like a history lecture. It’s the rare retelling where the backdrop isn’t just aesthetic — it’s the actual engine of the tragedy, which is exactly what a Romeo and Juliet story needs to justify its own existence in 2026’s crowded retelling market.