Love a book where I wish I could tuck away sentences in my pocket. The writing is atmospheric, poetic, haunting. Full of motifs and metaphors, it made me ruminate on all the connections between us and the natural world, even as sheltered creature living in the big city. This is an adventure novel and a love letter to the earth and a companion for navigating grief. The slow reveal of information kept me guessing in a way I rarely experience nowadays, and the payoff was a relationship with a character I struggled to understand but whose decisions felt real and urgent, in a way that brought her out of the page and to an ending that moved me.

Had to wait a bit after reading to write this review (because i'm only now getting into the habit of writing reviews--thx Pagebound, but mostly because I wasn't sure how to feel about this book upon finishing it & summing up ones thoughts on such an ambitious, wide-reaching novel is hard and imperfect!) My first Kuang book was Yellow Face, then Poppy War, and now Babel. That order matches my ranking in enjoyment too...with Babel being last...which I feel I must justify given the praise this novel has gotten from so many people in my life. I have a ton of appreciation for how real and messy this novel felt, which reflects the contradictions and nuance in the topics it's attempting to cover. Yellow Face and Poppy War set out with much simpler goals and were able to achieve them more successfully. As a book, Babel is a sledgehammer that takes out the drywall, insulation, and brick rather than a targeted drill. The hallmarks of what keep a book engaging for me--strong pacing, compelling characters, a tight plot--were not executed well in Babel. They were sacrificed for Kuang's grander project, as she puts it "all the gnarly, bizarre, fascinating facets to linguistics, translation, and colonialism I've been studying over the past few years." For me, this book read like that--several years of research and academic debate crammed into too few pages to make sense of it. So, while I could have so many interesting conversations with a topic from this book as a starting point, I finished feeling unsatisfied.

I started reading not knowing what to expect, and it took me awhile to start feeling attached to Mabel, but once that empathy hit, it hit hard. A heartwarming read about found family, courage, and hope that had me in tears by the end.

My fifth Silvia Moreno-Garcia book, after I DNF'd the fourth, so I really wanted to like this book. Not my favorite of her work but not the worst. From the description, this was right up my alley, as someone who has read my share of fictional Old Hollywood books. Sadly, I found most of the characters to be one dimensional and cliche. The POV I enjoyed most was Salome's, and her story was rendered with such feeling and color--her psyche was also so interesting and complex. The "modern day" characters in Hollywood felt like cardboard in comparison. The pacing was slow in the first 90% of the book, and since the characters didn't change or develop much, there wasn't much keeping me interested. The action in the last 10% was extremely gripping, but then the ending was so abrupt. Was left unsatisfied with the epilogue too.