kaecho 's review for:

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

4.0

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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barely scraping my way into finishing this book before it comes out. thanks to harper for the ARC, it sat in my house for months before i finally had the wherewithal to crack the thing open and make it more than 50 pages in.

i think the reception of this book will be a bit divisive among crowds that have been subjected to any sort of marketing beyond what the description of the book is. there are people saying it's a romance or a romantasy—that's not true, and people who go into this book thinking that will come out unsatisfied if they even make it to the end of the book. it's being pushed as a fantasy novel, which i can understand, but it's less of a fantasy than babel (and if you hated the prose in that book, there are 50/50 odds on you hating this more or thinking that this is what you wanted out of that book instead) and the whole time i was reading i went back and forth with myself over whether or not i wanted to advocate moving this from the fantasy section to fiction at work.

the fantastical parts of this book are so far out of focus at times in favor of character introspection and development or commentary on what it's like to be a woman in academia with an emotionally abusive

groomer

for a professor. these elements are well done, and the lack of magick isn't destressing or annoying or anything, but there are plenty of books about going to hell that aren't considered fantasy novels. there are plenty of epics with fantastical elements that are viewed as regular old fiction, and i think that katabasis falls more into that category than it does over with babel or the poppy war.

as hard as it was to get things going for me with this, i liked it by the time i finished it, but not as much as babel or yellowface, hence the 4 stars and not 5. alice and peter are both solid characters and kuang's version of hell is pretty interesting (until it kind of starts to dwindle away at the same time that things start to drag near the end, which was a weird experience) and i hope that anyone who reads this has experienced a college level philosophy class for at least a semester. its not that it would make you a better reader, just that it will make this book a little less painless when things start to get wordy.

this might just be the long lost cousin of the atlas six, so take that however you want to!