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A review by ketreads
Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang
dark
emotional
mysterious
fast-paced
2.0
This book is one I'd passed many a time in a bookstore. The cover is gorgeous and the concept of a fabled tower (Babel) being repurposed in a colonial society had me intrigued.
In short: this book wasn't it. At least, for me. It had all the trappings of what could have been a fantastic book, but fell short in both its pacing and choice of narrative style.
We follow our main character of Robin a child taken from his home land of China and bought up as a scholar of languages to benefit the tower of Babel. A tower rebuilt in England, where this world's magical source (bars of silver) are created. I loved the uniqueness of the magic system, especially how well language and it's uses fitted in well to the story Kuang wanted to tell.
My main issues started with how Kuang decided to tell this story. At key moments throughout the book, we'd often have an interruption of context from a voice outside of the main story. At first, this context was much appreciated, but wore on me the further we got into the story. I'm not sure how it's presented in the book, but this interruption could happen MULTIPLE times throughout a single conversation. While I understand and appreciate the context in Kuang's world, I feel like this information could have been better presented outside of "lore dump". Which is a very generous assessment seeing as it wasn't even weaved into character dialogue more then literally dumped on the page regardless of current happenings.
A similar narrative technique I didn't enjoy was having us stop mid-climatic scene to have the narrator tell us the outcome of events & it's impact in years to come.
Overall, while the I did appreciate and enjoy the ending, I felt the journey there both a drag (for the first half) and then rushed (the second half). We ended up with a pretty predictable story, even if the elements surrounding it felt unique in their own ways.
A bit disappointing. :(
In short: this book wasn't it. At least, for me. It had all the trappings of what could have been a fantastic book, but fell short in both its pacing and choice of narrative style.
We follow our main character of Robin a child taken from his home land of China and bought up as a scholar of languages to benefit the tower of Babel. A tower rebuilt in England, where this world's magical source (bars of silver) are created. I loved the uniqueness of the magic system, especially how well language and it's uses fitted in well to the story Kuang wanted to tell.
My main issues started with how Kuang decided to tell this story. At key moments throughout the book, we'd often have an interruption of context from a voice outside of the main story. At first, this context was much appreciated, but wore on me the further we got into the story. I'm not sure how it's presented in the book, but this interruption could happen MULTIPLE times throughout a single conversation. While I understand and appreciate the context in Kuang's world, I feel like this information could have been better presented outside of "lore dump". Which is a very generous assessment seeing as it wasn't even weaved into character dialogue more then literally dumped on the page regardless of current happenings.
A similar narrative technique I didn't enjoy was having us stop mid-climatic scene to have the narrator tell us the outcome of events & it's impact in years to come.
Overall, while the I did appreciate and enjoy the ending, I felt the journey there both a drag (for the first half) and then rushed (the second half). We ended up with a pretty predictable story, even if the elements surrounding it felt unique in their own ways.
A bit disappointing. :(