A review by verumsolum
Babel by R.F. Kuang

adventurous challenging emotional tense

• Strong character development? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.5

I hate to rate this book as low as a 4.5 out of 5, but… the ending turned a great book into a good one. Maybe that's on me for wanting pat answers to problems without easy solutions, but to read of all this

struggle for liberation from the empire

, only to have it end with

the protagonist's death

felt like I'd done all that reading, and nothing much about the world its in changed. And, reading this in early 2025, in the first weeks of the American president's second term in office (four years after his first term ended), I think I was hoping for inspiration and not grim realism. And the ending pushed the effect of this book towards the latter, for me.