Reviews with content warning for Xenophobia - Babel

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Reviews tagging 'Xenophobia'

meghanr17's review

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adventurous reflective tense 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? No

4.75

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jane3366's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-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? It's complicated

5.0

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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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prettieststar's review

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective slow-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

5.0

in my top five books

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rivetkitten's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad slow-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? It's complicated

4.5

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rizky's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious reflective slow-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

5.0

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finallythetruth's review

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dark informative mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

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

3.0

SOME MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

✅ What worked
• the exploration of Empire - what sustains it, the violence within it, the exploitation and plundering, how it treats the PoCs displaced from their colonised homelands as disposable, and welcomes and treats them "well" only for the benefit of Empire. For all of this book's flaws, this was something I enjoyed reading about.
• the exploration of languages and linguistics - as someone who loves languages, I enjoyed this too.
• the discussions about how we can bring down the Empire, though they could have gone much deeper.
• the revolutionary group was a potentially interesting group and they could have done so much more, but as i explain below, it's clear RFK does not understand direct action groups
• I learnt a lot about the history of the British Empire and now want to learn more about their exploitation of India

🙅🏻‍♀️ What didn't work so well
• RFK's writing is not as good as people think.
• She does not know how to write fully fleshed out characters. After 540 pages, I still barely know let alone like most of the characters. I liked Ramy and could picture Griffin and kinda wanted him to be the hero. Victoire was a bit hard for me to picture, Robin was so flat, and Letty was incredibly annoying which I imagine was RFK's goal as she tried to bring out the fragility of yt women. Professor Lovell was despicable and somewhat terrifying but I wanted more about his past and motivations.
• RFK will give us inklings of a character, she'll write stuff like "his face was unreadable" or "something flashed across his face but it was gone in an instant", but never gets around to fleshing this out.
• i think people are so taken aback by this book because they like the discussion of Empire - because RF Kuang spent so much of the book pontificating with her own thoughts about Empire, almost as if this is the first time someone has written about this. But to me this was done with so little subtlety or nuance. Too. Much. Lecturing. Show us, don't tell us. It almost felt like RFK was parroting things she'd read in Frantz Fanon's books.
• everything after the second sea voyage is so incredibly difficult to believe. It was incongruous to the direction we'd been led to believe the book would take.
• on this topic, it's clear RFK has never striked before nor has she been in a direct action group. Is the strike in the book meant to make up for RFK not striking with the Harper Collins workers?
• RFK portrays what at first appears to be a revolutionary group, but the actions that they take later on are just so unbelievable. We also barely get to see much of their global network and this should really have been explored in this book as a thread about how to bring down Empire. One of the members talks about how we have to unite in our struggle against colonisation, and the global network would have been a great way to show that. There could have been collaborations with other nations including ones that are heavily featured in the story, but this didn't happen (I guess it would have been hard to communicate rapidly, although the silver bars symbolised our modern technology so I'm sure they'd have found some way).
• she killed off too many characters. She also ends up representing resistance martyrs in a pretty colonised way.
• This is not a fantasy book and it should not be marketed as such. I still consider myself a beginner fantasy reader but this had so little world building in terms of a fantastical world.
• someone please tell RFK she isn't gonna make footnotes fetch. They were overused just for the purpose of her showing off her own knowledge. She spends too much time lecturing the reader (about language and history), the dialogue could be much more succinct, there's so many big chunky passages where no action takes place and the dialogue doesn't serve much purpose except to once again show off her knowledge. And there is a lot of repetition.
• finally, she has totally imposed 2020s DEI language onto 1800s Oxford students of colour. On the first sea voyage, Robin - probably a 11 year old at the time - mentally makes notes about the indentured labour that a Chinese sailor he encounters is contracted to complete. I have never met an 11 year old who speaks like this, and I don't expect people outside the West to utilise the same kind of DEI language either.

In the end i give this 6☆ out of 10. It seems crazy that after so many criticisms I still give 6☆. I don't think this is a terrible book, but it's just nowhere near as amazing as people think.

I want more of the bringing down Empire, i just think Rebecca doesn't understand it enough herself to be writing about it.

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