poetskings 's review for:

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

4.0

adventurous dark mysterious 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

---

i really enjoyed it. it has its faults - it’s babel’s intellectualism turned up to the point where it becomes ‘i’m smart look at me i’m smart do you know i’m smart’ in a way that doesn’t always serve the story, but kuang’s writing and worldbuilding is magical as always. alice isn’t always the most likeable protagonist, and this once again grapples with kuang’s own feelings about academia but dialled up to its extremes. the romance aspect of it as well is incredibly slow burn and very much secondary, so temper expectations there. i think it’s possibly a bit overlong and the middle dragged but as a whole it was a joy to be back in a world created by kuang, with compelling magic systems based around logic and paradoxes and interesting characters in alice and peter

plot:

alice works under professor grimes, and decides to go to hell to get his soul back, being joined but grimes’s other supervisee, peter. they grapple with navigating hell together, working their way through the layers to try and find grimes. there are bone creatures that they discover are the products of the kripkes, a family of mages who are desperate to escape hell. they meet elspeth, one of grimes’s former students who killed herself, and she helps them for a bit. they continue through hell until they get trapped by the kripkes, and they open up about why they’re here. they find out that they’ve both been pitted against each other by grimes as one of his many wrongs (including him tattooing alice with a pentagram to force her to have a perfect memory as an experiment, trying to sleep with her, stealing a paper off of peter that he couldn’t work on because of his chronic illness) and they both think they killed him. peter decides to sacrifice himself to the kripkes, using a logic paradox to get alice out while he’s left there to be drained of blood and killed. she keeps going for him, defeats the kripkes and is reunited with elspeth, who gives her a dialetheia (a plant, evidence of life growing in the realm of the dead, the break of logic). alice goes to lord yama and asks to see grimes, finally becoming utterly disillusioned with him and using peter’s work she exchanges grimes for peter. lord yama allows peter and alice to leave hell.