This book feels like "Potential Book" to me (like the potential man meme). I love the ideas, themes, and overall concepts Kuang is trying to convey but some of it falls kind of flat for me. I really wanted to absolutely love this book but there are just somethings I would have liked more if she did it differently. The pacing kind of annoyed me, i felt like we are going thriugh pages of hammering similar information through the device of flashbacks but going nowhere forwards in the moment. They spend more time slogging between courts than the courts themselves. And the flashbacks are good for developing the characters, however I feel like multiple flashbacks tell us the same thing. (See alice section)

[Spoilers start here] I love love love the idea of a modern dantes inferno, traversing hell has always been an interesting and cool idea to me (i have a story idea with this premise). I think the idea of equating hell to academia is super interesting, the fact the courts are part of a campus had me so excited but i was disappointed by how this idea gets dropped after the first 2. I wanted to see unique interpretations of each courttt pride and desire were so good i was like how is she going to make greed into academic thing or wrath just to be shown its all desert/swamp 😭. And like i said before they linger more between courts than actually focus on them and ik the point is Alice/Peter's character growth but i still wanted to see a unique world. [On Alice, minor spoilers] Im sorry but for a good amount of the book i couldnt stand Alice and i know thats supposed to be the point but she was really irritating me for a good minute. She keeps iterating the same point, rhat she was clearly a victim but she wasnt a victim because shes "different" like the reveal later on in the book came a shock to me because of how much praise grimes is given from her throughout the whole story. I would have expected grimes to be a fucking creep but i also dont understand how alice could praise him over and over again in every single instance when thats what he did to her ontop of everything else. Theres a point where the excuses just feel reduntant and it was lowkey exhausting to read through. Peter was also a victim of grimes but was more tolerable, maybe because we're not in his head the way we are in Alice's head but it came off that he realized they were victims way before alice did. I do enjoy their chemistry but i feel like it was so short lived, so much potential and i wish kuang did more with them because it really gets ruined by the miscommunication trope i fucking hate the miscommunication trope 😭.

Tldr; i feel like there was alot of potential in the world building, i found alice annoying for a good chunk of the book, the pacing is a bit too slow for my tastes.