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.