Honestly loved this book! It was so heartbreaking at points and I cried over and over but the plot, and the characters were amazing 🥹. The beginning of the book was a bit slow and info dumpy but once I got into part 2 it all started coming together and once we hit around 50% it was action packed and I could not stop reading ❤️

I had a good time in Hell, but I’m still feeling stupidly inferior

Yes, girl! Reference everything and give us NOTHING.

Katabasis is a glaring example of how boring and pretentious the 'academia' genre is. This is meant to be a character driven story, but even from the start, these characters are just bland vehicles used to regurgitate philosophical quotes and leap you from one plot point to the next so you are spoon-fed rehashed commentary on books like Dante's Inferno, tbh mainly Dante's Inferno.

It is incredibly long and droning for what it offers. The beginning had me close to DNF'ing, with its lack of stakes or anything offering a semblance of interesting topic, but the middle started to, admittedly, gain a bit of traction in said interesting topic issue, but by the last 1/3 it was right back to being an absolute chore to finish. By the end, it really just felt like a long-winded complaint of the academic world, which is valid, but has no business being so long to get such a point across.

At the end of the day, this book suffers greatly trying to be 'intelligent', but all it does is show how little creative freedom the author allowed in order to simply walk a reader through a retelling of Dante's Inferno, with many plot points feeling like a checklist of scenes vs. something cohesive and entertaining.

DNF! Got thru 60% and could care less about the characters.. I don't care about the plot and sounds like a bunch of adults that plot devised as REALLY immature when needed for really no reason and all of them have dark unredeemable qualities that to me signals they should stay right where they found themselves... also book has triggering/devaluing language to victims/survivors of SA and misconstrued understandings of mental health.. because I got so far with it TRYING to give it the chance I did I am marking this as a book I read where normal DNFs I remove because I do so early. I REALLY wanted to like this book because of the edition I bought but will now be unhauling this author from my Library and I just don't think they are for me.

For me, this was not quite as strong as some of Kuang’s other works, though it had many moments where it reminded me that it was, in fact, hers. And actually now on reflection, I like it more than I enjoyed it during, and I supposed it’s because we were in Hell together. I loved Babel, though it did drag for me at times a little bit, and this one did, too, but a journey into Hell would, wouldn’t it? An underlying idea of Hell being academia itself, or indeed anything that makes you lose sight of what you really believe or value, or who you really are, is certainly well taken for me as I recently quit teaching and am applying to go back to school so I can change careers. Like all of Kuang’s books that I have read so far, her characters are sort of frustratingly flawed/complicated and insufferable while being juuuust lovable enough to keep me interested and invested (Yellowface being the exception, that b sucked). I preferred Peter, but what can I say, I like my men simple and pretty, and I could tell from the jump that Alice, while being more interesting, perhaps, was entirely incorrect in every assumption she made about him. I liked the ending, though it was a lot quicker than allllll of the lead-up, and though I don’t know that Kuang is the epilogue type, due to this, I wouldn’t have minded one.