alex_henault 's review for:

Babel by R.F. Kuang

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This was not a book for me.  It did not really feel like fantasy. This book read like 544 pages of explanation as to why colonialism is bad. This is a topic I'm interested in but I'd rather get that information from a nonfiction book than a work of fiction whose plot is, frankly, boring. Or, I'd rather been shown the downsides of colonialism rather than told. I began to feel as if my brain was being beaten. There were scenes that felt as if they were meant to be twists but because the book was so predicable it all fell flat for me. This book wanted so hard to be profound but failed miserably.