Review by avciera7 - Babel

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avciera7 's review for:

Babel by R.F. Kuang

4.75

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious 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: Yes

How to sum up this book? Ambitious. I am a person who loves words, trying to dissect them, and just the beautiful sounds they make. The translation/etymology aspects of this book were amazing to read. I feel like I learned so much from reading this, as a person who isn't the most historically savvy. I could tell an immense amount of research went into it. At times, the characters spoke in a way that felt much too modern, but maybe that was intentional. I did feel like the author wasn't fully successful at weaving the silver magic system with the real history being discussed, but what an amazing idea. I did not go into this book expecting it to be a fantasy book, nor was that what I thought it was by the end, so the reviews labelling it such or calling it a "bad fantasy novel" are confusing to me. I feel like most of the characters were well-fleshed-out, though I found Victoire's characterization a bit lacking for such a major character. Some of the points the author was making got a bit repetitive or over-explained. For me the book kind of fell apart in terms of what it wanted to say and where it was going towards the end. What are we meant to believe about the "necessity of violence" by the end? Unclear, outside of Robin's perspective. The more it turned into a war novel the more it lost me. Still this was a pretty amazing read and I feel like it succeeding in most of what it set out to do.

Content Warnings