I was cringing at first when I started reading it probably because it’s a translated book. I often get this feeling whenever I read Japanese literature. I didn’t feel particularly fond of the characters or even the plot. But somehow, I kept finding insightful quotes here and there, and there’s a certain purity in them. My actual rating would be 3.5/5. Still, after finishing it, I felt warm all over my body. Turns out, I like this one after all.

I went into this book kinda scared cause I was expecting something very heavy academic wise, huge chunks of info dump with a lot of expensive words and basically a phd thesis. And when I started reading I realized that this was just an academic fantasy book.

I’m not gonna say that the book was super easy to read, cause obviously it still has very complex subjects and the book goes very deep into them and it still has a lot of a more higher difficulty words (specially if your first language is not english), but you could still read and understand the book in a way to understand the story as a whole and what was going on. It still very much read like a fantasy book. Sure, there were quite a few parts where subjects were explained in extreme detail and sure, maybe it was the author’s way to showcase her knowledge, but these always made sense with the story and characters and never felt like they were random.

Plot wise, I did find the story as a whole really interesting, specialty how it unfolds and changes with the characters. The more we learn about them, their personalities, their motives, their actions and way of thinking, the story takes a different path or just starts to look different cause now we’re seeing it with a new perspective. I didn’t love the back and forth of talking about the past to explain the present, but honestly that’s just a preference and I still think this was done pretty well.

The characters were really well constructed and, just like with the plot, it was interesting to see how the way we viewed them would change the more we learned about them. I have so much empathy for Alice and what she went through, cause she was basically trying to survive in an academic world that was built for and by men. And I do think by the end of the book she realized her wrongs and all she wanted was to correct them.

And I loved the ending! At one point I was kinda scared that things weren’t gonna turn out all right, but the ending made perfect sense and completed the story really well. This was quite a heavy read, and all the explaining got really tiring at parts which made the reading a bit dull, but overall pretty interesting story.