Reviews tagging 'Injury/Injury detail'

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang

252 reviews

rcarri264's review against another edition

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dark emotional 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? It's complicated

5.0


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teabrewer's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative 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? No

5.0

I've felt like this about a book and never this intensely. I cried when I closed it for the last time, after reading the last word of the last line of the acknowledgements. I felt like something was being taken from me. Like my skin streched and ripped as the story got farther and farther away. I couldn't let go of the book. Like a mother and her child holding each other after birth, but I didn't feel like a mother, maybe like a child. I feel like my molecules are now organized diferently. I didn't want it to be over, but I don't know if liking would be the correct word for the experience.

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nordicat's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious 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? Yes

5.0


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rainbowalcremie1995's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful informative reflective 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? Yes

4.0

Overall, this was an enjoyable book for people who want to read a fantasy story about academia that acknowledges the ways academic institutions can be both helpful and harmful to the societies they’re a part of.  

I really enjoyed the magic system that was introduced in the book.  Although the characters in the book may have to study for hours on end to master it, it wasn’t too complicated for a reader to understand.  

I don’t really have an individual favorite character in this book, but some of my favorite parts were whenever Robin and his cohort were just hanging out and talking about their studies, and it made the things they went through together near the end of the book a lot more impactful.  I feel like at times, the characters in this book work best when they’re bouncing off of other characters.  I really liked Griffin as a foil to Robin, and Letty being the odd one out of her friend group.  I was surprised at how much Robin grew as a character by the end as well.  In the first half of the story, I found him a little passive, acting as a camera to the more interesting characters in the story.  Now that I’ve finished the book, though, I think this flaw may have been intentional, and it makes it a lot more satisfying to see him come into his own by the end.  

I think that the pacing could be a little awkward at times, and there were definitely parts of the book that I felt could have been arranged a little differently.  For example, I thought that the Hermes Society being introduced so early in the story made certain reveals about Babel’s true nature a lot less impactful.  In fact, I would say that a pretty big weakness of this book is that most of the plot twists very predictable. 
I saw Letty’s betrayal coming from a mile away, as I’m sure most readers did.  I think that her POV chapter coming after the betrayal was also unnecessary, it didn’t add anything to her character that we didn’t already know.
 

In addition, it sometimes feels like the book is too afraid of subtext and has to make the themes explicit in both the main text and the many footnotes.  Which is a shame, because there were a some good lines in this book where a member of the faculty or an older student would say something normal but extremely sinister, but very few of them were allowed to hang without a footnote butting in to say, “By the way, they just said something racist.”  I guess not everyone reading this book will have the same background knowledge coming in to it, but I wish that the buildup to Babel not being as great as it seems on the surface had been more gradual.  

Despite the book having a bit of a slow middle, I thought the last third of the book was pretty good.  I was up until two in the morning yesterday just to see how it ended! 
I wish that the Hermes Society and the older students who were members got some more character development before they died.  I am glad that Victoire got a little more character development near the end as she helps Robin start the strike.  The progression of the strike and the descriptions of society breaking down as the result of one academic tower no longer maintaining the silver was well done, as was Robin’s final descent into violence that leads up to his death.  At first, I was surprised that the strike ended tragically, with Robin and almost all of his allies in the tower sacrificing themselves to blow it up.  However, it’s still a hopeful ending, and it probably would have been a little too neat of the strike had completely changed society overnight without any bloodshed.
 

I can’t judge this book on how well it works as a piece of historical fiction, as I’m not too familiar with the history of the Opium Wars, and I only speak English.  As a fantasy novel, I can say that I had a fun time reading it, and although I think this book is a little too long for me to ever want to read the entire thing over again, I think it definitely earns four stars from me.  

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xeniba's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging 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? It's complicated

4.5

The premise of Babel is fascinating and I found the world building to be quite well-done. Though the book was predictable and dragged at times, I still couldn’t put it down.

I absolutely loved learning about the magic and language in the first part of the book.

Minor quibble: There were a LOT of footnotes and a couple of them didn’t render on my eReader. One of them was actually interesting, but I had to look at it on my phone to know that. 

I do wish we’d learned more about the rest of the folks in the tower at the end. And more about Victoire throughout the book. I also wish we’d been able to see a bit more of the Hermes Society in the Old Library.

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hannahcstocks's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective 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? It's complicated

4.25


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letterpress's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I think I am still gasping for breath. I am clapping, if all dark academia is not written like this I do not want it. She was able to write what could have been such an elitist topic to something that was very easy to grasp, you don't even have to go searching. I want more!

This book is a straight masterpiece. It is so refreshing to read a victorian age dark academia novel through the eyes of people of color. I cannot fully grasp how she was able to touch on so many topics. From classism to racism to economics she covered it all masterfully. I was learning new scopes of language as I was trying to read this. 

Her characterization of Letty and the and white guilt was so spot on. My mind is still reeling. Her characterization of being a person of color who is provided opportunity and the guilt/shame you can sometimes feel was also spot on. I did not know that my soul needed to read a view point of this age that is not told by the white majority. This was like therapy and a history lesson all in one.

A required read.

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crybabybea's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Well, I'm disappointed.

First of all, the dark academia aspect was done very well. It felt atmospheric, grand, with a hint of mystery. It felt gloomy in a really fun way. The settings outside of the tower itself were less immersive, but the majority of the story takes place inside the tower anyway so it wasn't too distracting. The dark academia vibe was a genius way to explore a story about decolonization and racism. The magic system was inventive and interesting, and I liked how it stood as a metaphor for the industrial revolution.

The characters were just okay. We get to see Robin, the main character, the most, and I felt really attached to him by the end. The other characters had interesting stories that I felt didn't get explored enough. I understand this book leans in to its literary side, and the characters and arguably the entire plot are just allegories for bigger issues, but I think this made the character work suffer and it made the explosive ending pack less of a punch. Don't get me wrong, I loved the ending, and I still cried, but some of the other moments that were meant to be heavy-hitting fell flat because I didn't feel the connection to the characters. The found family aspect didn't feel fleshed out enough because of this as well.

I think the character work is a side effect of Kuang's tendency to overexplain things rather than actually have things happen. Some of the messaging was so on the nose that it felt pedantic and almost condescending at times. I wanted to read this book to challenge my thinking, and I hoped it would leave me with lots of thoughts to reflect on afterward, but everything gets explained to you so plainly that it completely ruins the amazing research and work Kuang put into telling the story of racism and colonization in academia. I mean, there were literally times when something racist or sexist would happen, then the narrator would have a whole paragraph to say something like "Robin wonders if this white person realized how racist they were being". It got irritating... I felt like I was on Sesame Street. I will say the writing itself was done very well, the prose was accessible despite the scientific, historical, and literary references used, and I appreciated a lot of R.F. Kuang's comments and her sarcastic footnotes.

The last issue is the pacing, which I think is also a side effect of this "telling not showing" issue. This book only gets good around the 60-70% mark. It had an extremely slow start with very little intrigue. We spent a long time in lectures and I felt not enough time was dedicated to furthering either the charcters OR the plot. It was a lot of sitting around and waiting. I don't mind books that have a hill into a snowball second half, but I almost put this book down multiple times because nothing was happening, then one minor action would happen and I would finally think we were going somewhere, just for it to slow down again. 

All these issues made for a really weird reading experience where I absolutely dreaded picking the book back up, then when I started reading it was just fine and I wanted to know more, then it would get boring and the cycle repeated. I expected more from the rave reviews but left feeling like its potential got wasted. I still do think it's a good read overall, but it could have been better. 

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ryanandrew23's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective 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

5.0


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alainral's review against another edition

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challenging emotional 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? Yes

4.0


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