Reviews with content warning for Grief - Babel

Reviews tagging 'Grief'

endlessallison's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad 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

This book is so relevant to today and captures the perspectives of both the colonizers and the colonized on such beautifully blunt painful ways I truly believe everyone should read it.

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joey_estrada's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious sad 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

4.5

The writing is beautiful and poetic and flows smoothly. I like how the dialogue is written.
I really liked all the literary references and just the general atmosphere of the book. Reading it made me feel smart and uneducated at the same time.

The way that colonialism, racism, slavery, etc. were talked about was very interesting and felt brutally honest, which I appreciate and think is needed when talking about this sort of thing.
Language was intertwined with and used as an example of how colonialism affects people and their identity. I thought it was done very well.

The character development for everyone but especially Robin was very interesting to see and perfectly shown.
You can see how drastically Robin's thoughts, feelings, and morals change and go back and forth. You can see his inner turmoil and contradictions so vividly.

This book did not go quite how I expected it to based on some happenings towards the beginning, but truthfully, it got so much better and more interesting than I thought it would and I already had high hopes for this book. I cried and teared up multiple times while reading for multiple different reasons.

I think everyone should read this at least once.
The feeling of being alone as a person of color, the different yet similar experiences people of color can have from each other, the devastating cruelty of how racism and colonialism work, the tragic realizations all throughout, and even more emotional, heavy, complicated, upsetting topics are somehow put into words perfectly.

(I realize that this is a very long review, but this book is so packed full with emotion and information that I feel it's only right. For all I know, I'll add more thoughts later.)

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aidamaria_reads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad 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? It's complicated

5.0

This is a literary middle finger to colonialism, capitalism, racism, classism, sexism and all the other -isms, basically. I admire the way the author came up with the magic system (as a former translation student, it was truly amazing) and how it plays into the historical setting. The writing was wonderful. I wonder how long we’ve got until some government(s) bans this book.

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koolaberg's review

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challenging dark emotional inspiring 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

4.75

Loved the audio book. The linguistic aspects were much better hearing multiple accents and native speakers.

Most of the book was quite slow, particularly the beginning. But it was also quite charming and pleasant to become wrapped up in the world of Oxford in the 1830s. As an academic, it was endearing to experience another POV reflecting the love/hate relationship I feel with “the academy.” The last 1/4 of the book is quite a different pace and almost an entirely different book. I found the eventual conclusion quite heartbreaking but also satisfying given the current political climate of the US. The idea that foreign scholars could be in solidarity with the working classes gave me hope.

I found myself feeling so angry and cursing Letty for her betrayal. And the deaths of several key characters (Lovell, Remy, Griffin) made the stakes feel authentic. It’s quite poetic and tragic that we never learn Robin’s name in Cantonese.

The book was a bit long compared to my usual books, and perhaps could have been a duology. But I appreciated that the publisher doesn’t make the readers buy two books unnecessarily. This book felt like an excellent companion after Les Miserables.

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snowiceblackfruit77's review

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dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

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

4.25

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carlottab13's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad 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

4.5

My first - and most definitely not last - R.F. Kuang. A monumental piece of work with such a simple yet brilliant magic system that continued to utterly impress me. I’m really struggling to create a coherent review that does the novel’s brilliance justice so I might need to resort to listing a few of the core elements that make this book feel like so much more than just a fictional story: the linguistic discussions about language development and language similarities, the inevitable subjectivity and biases of translation in any context, the anti-colonialist commentary in the narration and predominantly the footnotes and lastly, the near inescapable doom of systemic oppression.

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