Honestly I was really enjoying it and that whole “surprise you’re actually siblings” ruined this entire book. So much so that I will not be continuing this series. I’m so pissed rn😭😭😭

As someone who spent over 20 years in school in total between elementary school until graduating from my doctorate, I am very familiar with the world of academia and the desperation for academic achievement/validation (maybe the latter is also a result of just being raised by traditional Chinese parents lol), which is likely why this book largely worked for me. A lot of people have criticized this book for being pretentious and dislike Alice for being cold, unempathetic, and obsessed with validation, and I could see all of that criticism as I read it...except that Alice is me and I am Alice, which really elevated the book for me.

Was this the perfect book? Definitely not, as you can see from my rating, but it was a book that I very much related to.

Alice is an exaggerated version of who I have been all my life. Academic achievement, grades, and other signs of validation have always been pushed as the Ultimate Ambition from when I was in elementary school, through high school, college, and beyond. There was never any question of whether I would be a doctor (actually, my parents had wanted me to be a medical doctor, but joke's on them I guess). It just always was, like how the sky is blue and ducks quack. Ambition was bred into me from an early age and has made me who I am; when people ask me what my main quality is, ambition is one of the first ones I list.

So for all of these reasons, Alice was extremely relatable to me. I understood her single-minded devotion to getting the grades and passing her dissertation and getting a good job, because that had been me for most of my life. I understood that obsession over her "competition" to the point where nothing else mattered, not even herself and her own well-being. Because Alice is Asian, I am very curious whether Kuang meant for her culture and way her parents may have raised her to elevate schooling played a role in her ambition; I think that would have been an interesting area to explore because it's so culturally relevant as well. In Chinese culture, school and then job is everything, and I think that played out in Alice throughout this book despite not being explicitly addressed. I did also love her gradual development, especially towards the end of the book, as she realizes that there's life beyond her ambitions, and that this might not actually be everything she wants out of her own life. This book is not only a criticism, but a celebration of truly living and what that means, and Alice was such a great vessel for Kuang to impart this message.

I found the relationship between Alice and Peter to be super interesting, both as competitors and then friends, but I wish there had been more...something. Not development exactly, but I also feel like I wanted more of them to just...talk? A big part of their relationship has to do with not talking to each other, and miscommunication is just super annoying to me because it's so overused—especially because here, some of the miscommunication really felt illogical. But I found the way that they balanced each other out in various ways (physically, morally, emotionally) to be both logical and satisfying.

Both Katabasis and Babel were criticisms of higher education and academia, but Katabasis even more so, since the focus was the way that graduate students are taken advantage of with no recourse. This again is something I am very familiar with; the way I was raised very much encouraged me to do whatever I had to in order to succeed, so I understand how and why Alice basically worshipped Grimes even though he was (as we can see via being outside the situation) emotionally abusive. Thankfully, I never had any experiences like Alice's in my schooling, but the elitism in higher education is absolutely there. I thought that Kuang really was able to show how those in higher education, especially the "old guard" in elite schools, really struggle to adapt to anything new or change their ways, because they are Right and everyone else has to deal with it.

I also really related to the way that graduate students are overworked and underpaid, because it's still very true. I remember my friend who was getting a doctorate in geology told me she was doing 80 hour weeks and eventually left the field/her program because of what it was doing to her mental health. Of course, it's important to push students to be their best, but not at the expense of their physical or mental health, and it's certainly never okay to emotionally, verbally, or sexually harass or abuse your students. I think this is a line that has gotten better since the year this book was set, but it is still out there. Additionally, I feel like Kuang captured the culture of competition and suspiciousness between students in higher ed very accurately.

I found the worldbuilding of Hell itself to be fairly disappointing. We don't really see very much of the different levels of Hell despite the time spent in the narrative discussing what it would look like on a map and all that. We spend the most time in the first two levels (Pride and Desire) and a bit of time in Dis, but after that it all sort of feels like a bit of a blur of deserts and other monotonous landscapes. Even in those levels that we spent time in, there was something that felt missing, like we just got a peek and that was about it. Maybe that is the point, that Hell is just monotonous, but I think there could have been some really cool worldbuilding that was missed here.

Related to that, the pacing was extremely inconsistent throughout this book. I found myself really struggling to plod along at the beginning, and then things picked up a bit, and then there was another period that was disengaging, and then things picked up again when Alice faces off against the Kripkes and meets King Yama. There were long periods when I felt like I was plodding along in Hell along with Alice and Peter in the desert because it just kept going on and on. If that was the feeling Kuang wanted to inspire in her readers, then she absolutely succeeded.

A lot of that was due to the amount of philosophical ideas that were described and analyzed in this book. I am not a philosophical creature, so most of it went over my head and I just sort of handwaved it as "logical magic" or something similar, but there was so much of it that it just slowed the book down to a crawl at points and contributed to the accusations of pretentiousness that this book has. I don't think I could tell you a single paradox or theory of Hell that this book discusses, but tbh, that's not really what I took away from this book. Some people have said that this book feels like Kuang is just showing off her knowledge and...yes? Maybe? I mean, if I had this kind of esoteric knowledge, I might want to show it off too lol. But I do see why people were over it, because I was also over it (and I'm a pretentious bitch myself).

Overall, I loved the characters and the way that Kuang used this book to both criticize and defend academia and higher education. I feel like the pacing and long rambling paragraphs about various paradoxes and other philosophical ideas could have been reworked, and I also wish we'd gotten better worldbuilding. I would recommend this book to anyone who has had experience in academia, people who can stomach philosophy at length, or people who feel ambition in their bones and want to understand the price of of it.

[tw: Animal death, bullying, child death, chronic illness, death, eating disorder, emotional abuse, misogyny, murder, sexual harassment/assault, suicidal thoughts, suicide (past)]