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birdwithsword 's review for:

Babylonia by Costanza Casati
3.0
dark tense
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

An oddly dreamlike book in which characters are more archetypes fhan believable people. There isn't really any character growth for anyone at all and the plot has a distinct sense of inevitability to it. Perhaps that was on purpose, given some of the themes of the book, but it created a very detached vibe that made it hard to get truly invested even as I kept turning pages.

The constant Pearls of Wisdom got old rather fast and the references to Gilgamesh weren't as organic or coherent as I suspect the author would have liked. I feel like for so much of this book I can see what she was going for, but the pieces never quite came together, much less as more than the sum of their parts.