Review by okevamae - Katabasis

okevamae 's review for:

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

3.75

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The plot of this book is about a journey through Hell, but honestly, that was the least interesting thing about it for me. The magic system is interesting but not fully fleshed out. This has little impact on the story, though, so it wasn’t a big deal. The novel goes pretty heavily into the major flaws of academia (if you're familiar with R. F. Kuang and saw that this was set at Cambridge, you probably saw that coming.) As can also be expected with this author, there’s a lot of feminist themes – the main female character is brimming with the feminine rage that comes from being both overlooked and exploited because of your gender, and that comes always stifling yourself, never speaking up for yourself and being unfairly punished when you do. There’s also a pretty stark indictment of women who like to reap the benefits of feminism but don’t want to be associated with it because of the derision men like to heap on feminists. Alice can be a fairly annoying character at times but when viewed through the lenses of the time period (1980s), her career path (academia), and the rampant misogyny in both those settings, her character makes a lot more sense.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the complex and fraught relationship between Alice and Peter, and the second most interesting part was the backstory sections that showed the events that led up to this point and the context that revealed their true reasons for taking on the journey. Unfortunately, this meant that about 75% in, when the two of them were separated and the bulk of the backstory had been revealed, I got kind of bored. I just didn’t care all that much for Alice on her own without Peter as a foil, though to be fair she went through some major character growth in that time. Mostly just I didn’t care that much about the journey to Hell itself as a plot. I’ve never read Inferno or the Aeneid or any of that, nor been interested in doing so, and all I know about Greek and Roman underworld myths comes from what I learned about those mythologies as a kid. Kuang’s conception of Hell was an imaginative take, to be sure, but not interesting enough to keep my interest when nothing was happening with the emotional side of the story.

I listened to the audiobook - the narrators do a pretty good job, but the female narrator’s American accent is not as solid as it needs to be for a book with an American main character. No native speaker of American English is ever going to stick a random R in between the words “pizza” and “anus.” (Yes, those words are strung together in this book, don’t worry about it.) And for some reason, in the last few minutes of the book, it switches to duet narration? All of a sudden, the male narrator is reading the male characters’ dialogue, with no explanation. The rest of the book was not that way. I don’t know if this is a weird thing that happened because it’s an ARC? If anybody listened to the audio of the finished book, can you let me know if this happened there too? It was bizarre.

Overall, I’m going to say it’s a 3.75, rounded up to 4 stars.

Representation: Asian main character, chronically ill main character

CW: sexual harassment, abuse of power, suicidal ideation

Content Warnings