Reviews with content warning for Death - Babel

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Babel by R.F. Kuang

1172 reviews

_polaris_'s review against another edition

challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This is a brilliant book! No questions about it.
It challenged me, touched me deeply and is so well structured and written.

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senga15's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

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princess_azula's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional inspiring tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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thestoriessofar's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This was such a highly anticipated read for me but it felt like sitting through a lecture

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hannasreads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Review/thoughts babel:

This was such a wild ride, it was like watching a car crash happening and not being able for some terrible, terrible reason to look away. I read some other review that said, to them this felt a bit trauma porn-y and I get that, like from the very start you felt the underlying notes of “this isn’t going to end well” but I still couldn’t stop reading. I have to say that was somehow one of the really strong suits of this book, it truly enthralled me and had this grip on me that I haven’t felt reading for a long time (to be fair I think this was also aided by me often choosing to just not read the footnotes, more on that later). The plot was winding and at times meandering but there were several moments where I truly felt the anxiety of the situation (maybe more so than the characters?). Overall, I think it was interesting, a mixed bag, a really great concept, it’s just the execution that led me down.

My overall issue with this was that it felt like it had little to no revisions, not in a grammar or spelling kind of way but when it comes to storytelling. It felt like characters and situations would bend to whatever the story needed from them at that given time rather than to any foundation of who or what they are, based on what we read about them before. In general, the characters were really rather shallow and they faded to the background for the last half, before becoming a focal point again in some final lines. The book tackles colonialism and uses a very mixed group of students to focus on, all of which experience the effects of colonialism and discrimination in different ways, but what was the benefit of that? We never get to hear their emotional, inner life and dealings with what it means for them to live this experience, it’s at most expressed in small chunks of dialogue that tell us that they for example never felt seen or supported by their white peers but we’re never show what this does to them emotionally. I often felt like I really wanted to sit down with them and listen to their thoughts about all of this, but it felt like the author obviously didn’t feel the same. The character’s therefore, at latest by halfway through the book, just feel like stand ins for the different groups of people affected by the British Empire. I was hoping for more. This also became an issue for me regarding their friendship, which is at first extremely fierce and also notably desperate, the author says how they cling to each other like lifeboats and that makes so much sense especially for foreign first years at Oxford, but the years go on, they spend every waking moment together and then *SPOILER* at the end their friendship falls apart and that’s just expected? Because of who they are as people? But they grew together for 4 years? In some of the most critical time? And again, we get no at length discussion about what this fallout does to them? *END* I alternate between this is unbelievable, what was the point of their friendship then, and this is not fledged out writing.

At times I did feel like a lot of the more questionable, interesting things that happened were maybe reflections on the complexity and lack of clear cut answers in relation to a lot of these issues, mainly Robin and his relationship to colonialism, Oxford and the rebellion. But it left me with an impression more so of ‘look how people can be radicalised into violence’ rather than ‘the necessity of violence’, as per subtitle, because Robin has no own personal development aside being shoved from one perspective to the next based on who he is around. *SPOILER* We see how little the rebellion and his brother care for him, time and time again and this is a point of contention for some part of the book, but by the end he completely has forgotten all about it and is all for violence, and it left me questioning about if this really was supposed to be heroism or a statement on radicalism. *END* I liked these, what I perceived, subtler discussions about rebellions and radicalisation but I am not quite certain that the author actually wanted me to read it like that, because NOTHING about this book is subtle - apart from apparently a romance subplot that I just didn’t even really pick up on. The message, or one of the messages in its most crystallised form, is ‘colonialism is bad’. But the author doesn’t trust her readers to either know that already or infer that from everything that is described. This is also not helped by some of the dialogue that is so overtly very modern (and important) talking points. It felt like the author sacrificed the historical fantasy aspect of the book at times to make the characters sound like twitter uses (?) in order to make the message drive home with the reader, and that for me just really took me out of the story and made me dislike the way she went about it (I already agree with you!!). It is so over the top in this hammering down of this very basic message, that again any of the more nuanced discussion around that, like what does that mean for our main characters and their friendship, is left wanting. And here the footnotes also come in, I read a digital version so it was annoying always going forth a couple hundred pages to read the footnotes, and after a while I just stopped because they often were just more and more of colonialism is bad, which I felt really didn’t need any further clarification. - Also on a side note, the way she utilised footnotes stressed me out. She didn’t use them coherently, either for further argumentation of a point that had no place in the narrative, to provide evidence, to give translations, etc, no she used them for all of the above but only some of the time? It was never clear to me why she gave a footnote at one point but not another? Like for some things she gave references but others she didn’t? Why? For some romanised mandarin she provided a footnote with the character, other times she just used the character in the text? Why? I just felt like an editor really should’ve done something about that. And on another point, the idea of footnotes is that it is supplementary, so why are so many of those footnotes arguing for the main message of the book, that racism is bad, like that should be in the text, that is your thesis. -

One last thing, the fantasy was so little like fantasy that I told my mom who hates fantasy that I think she would like it. Basically, the idea is interesting, but it has almost no effect on the world. Of curse by the very end it becomes a crucial player in the rebellion, but the entire time I was left with this feeling like, if we didn’t have the silver magic here, it is just one for one our world. It is the ‘silver’ industrial revolution, but truly it is just the industrial revolution but they also have silver. I felt this was a bit, lackluster, it just didn’t feel very imaginative. If silver-working had been around and such an integral part of that world for so long, surely there would’ve been more and different developments, than those that occurred in our world? And as much as I found the idea of the magic interesting, it is at times over and under explained. Why silver? Who discovered that? What were rudimentary forms of that? Why has no one ever tried anything other but silver bars? And then on the other hand the use of etymology got so much space on the page, it was honestly not just overkill but also not reasonable in the realm of the plot. These students all are fluent in Latin and Greek and two if not more languages, and have etymology lessons almost every day it seems like, but then there are so many scenes where either the villains or their friend or professors explain certain etymology to them??? I get that that is important for the reader but, should I really sit here and believe that our main characters would actually listen to a paragraph long explanation of why a silver bar works and what it does based on an etymology that they probably already know??? Like no way? They would pick up the bar, read that inscription and be like ‘ah ok I get what this does’. THIS is a moment a footnote would’ve made sense. It took me out of several scenes and made the characters more unbelievable, and I was thinking the whole time, why not give this space to character development!?

Overall, I did enjoy reading this for the most part, there were some very interesting discussions tucked into it and the atmosphere was pretty all encompassing. However, I don’t think that this is the five star, no faults detected read that it is made out to be. It is mainly the writing style and maybe a lack of refinement in some areas that sadly really push this down for me. But I love a book that gets me reflecting, not just about societal issues but also about what makes a good book and what kind of writing I like, that makes me seek out other reviews, which this one for sure has made me do, as such this was a worthy read!

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lindsay0320's review

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adventurous dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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katherineshawwrites's review

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challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

I wasn't sure if Babel would live up to the hype it received when it first hit the reading community, but my goodness, it does.

If you're going into Babel expecting a high fantasy dark academia story, you're going to be disappointed, but if you go in with an open mind, you'll get a fascinating, powerful and tragic take on the magic of languages, alongside the horror and injustice of colonialism and racism.

With this story, R F Kuang delivers a gripping and moving narrative that's steeped in history, and her academic experience in language really shines through not only within the plot itself, but in all the wonderfully crafted notes that accompany the text. It gives the book an academic rigour you rarely see in fiction whilst never losing sight of the story.

Some of the hard-hitting commentary around the British Empire (and similar colonial nations) and its amoral actions can be tough to swallow, but isn't that the point? R F Kuang pulls no punches, and I love her for that. The characters show us through their own lenses, backgrounds and personal storylines what atrocities have been committed in the name of imperialism, economic growth and capitalistic greed, and right now I think we all need to be reminded of that.

Despite its academic nature, the book is full of twists and turns, a great deal of tension, and rising stakes right until the very end, and I was flying through the final pages to see how it would all end for Robin. R F Kuang's writing is superb throughout, and I would highly recommend this to anyone unafraid of some hard truths and powerful storytelling.

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raitherabbit's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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lost_page's review

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adventurous dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

thebibliotourist's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book is hard to describe, but all I can say is it will make you come to terms with how you feel about other cultures and nationalities and being infuriated how someone can feel more superior than others is ok.

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