"Martin is water, I am smoke. She is fire."

Set in early 90s Ireland, this follows Lucy over a few years of her teenage life, as she navigates family expectations, old fashioned values and religion with her burgeoning romance with her friend, Susannah. The sapphic angst was beautifully written, and I'll be recommending this book forever.

As a fan of both Babel and Yellowface, I did expect this book to be academic and have concepts I didn't understand. But with Babel's use of language and history, I felt included and it made sense to the story. In Katabasis I constantly felt that Kuang was just saying concepts with no explanation of them, in order to sound smart. I can yell pythagorean theorem, it doesn't mean I'm intelligent.

The magic system is let down as a result of this, the characters reduced to muttering vaguely while scribbling chalk pentagrams and yelling concepts, which felt repetative, as if they were repeating the same steps for each allegedly different spell. While Babel use of language as magic was flawed, I felt the author's love of language came through, and I connected to that. I couldn't connect to this.

Alice seems to be a self insert of the author, which is bizarre to me as Alice is a genuinely horrible person, and Kuang doesn't do enough, if anything, to try and redeem her. From "suicidal depression was just an extreme form of failure" to "when she first heard that Professor Grimes had a problem keeping his hands to himself she felt a thrill of excitement", I struggled to understand how I was supposed to root for her.

Hell itself is grey. It felt completely lacking in description, and my excitement for seeing all the different realms and the people that were imprisoned there quickly disappeared after the first, when I realised that it was all going to feel exactly the same - dull, flat and grey. And it did. Only three realms had details that were memorable, and we never stayed there long.

The villains in this were entirely background for the majority of the book, and the Kripkes themselves seemed like a fairly useless edition, being little more than a mysterious presence. Grimes was better used, but at some point their epic quest to find him fell by the wayside, and his death would have been more satisfying had it not been at the start of the story.

This could have been an incredible bridge between Babel and Yellowface, had the concept of Hell been scrapped entirely, and all the sections of the past we kept going back to were used to tell the story in a linear timeline, ending with the professor's death. I could feel the author I enjoyed reading the most in those sections, and I don't feel she had a strong enough concept of Hell in mind to bother writing about it.

And did I mention the dog fellatio?

I dearly wish we could have gotten more time with the Scooby Doo Insomniac Crew

This was such an incredible ride right through to the bloody, brutal end and I am FLOORED by how wonderfully dark and the lengths it went to. There were times when the story felt slower, but instead of dragging it just became more atmospheric, using the time to bond Felicity and Ellis closer over dim candlelight, unfinished essays, stories of murdered girls and the disappearance of Felicity's ex girlfriend, Alex, who still haunts her.

I trusted correctly that the story was leading me down a path I wouldn't be able to predict, and I as I started to realise that Ellis seemed to be leading Felicity to terrible decisions, the more I started to question her intentions. Both Felicity and Ellis are unpredictable, morally grey characters which really heightened my enjoyment of the story.

The Starless Sea is a strange book, with stories on stories layered together to paint a warped history of a world beyond doors. You have to pay attention in order to piece it together, but I found that this made for a really rewarding re-read. The only thing that let me down was the weak ending, I wanted something a little more satisfying.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins finds a mysterious book at a library and opens it to find out that it's about him. His hunt for the meaning behind this book and the secret society it's connected to is the strongest part of the story, as he travels to wild parties and finally finds himself tumbling into the world of The Starless Sea, at the end of it's days.

One thing I would really love is not a sequel, but a prequel. We're constantly given glimpses of the world at it's height, rumours of wild parties, vistors leaving traces of themselves behind and it seems the world was a sanctuary back then. I wanted to travel back to those days so badly, and I hope Erin revisits this world one day.

Like if The Mummy was written in the style of The Secret History but it's about Vampires

This book wasn't fully on my radar until I saw an Interview with Susanna, and she mentioned that she was influenced by Narnia. There was enough clues that I gathered throughout the book to guess that this book is actually a sequel to The Magician's Nephew, which may be my favourite and most read book in the Chronicles Of Narnia series.

I was not too familiar with the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (thanks Google) until I finished the book and started looking at his work. Incredibly, the depictions I had in my head of Piranesi's House in the book matched the original Piranesi's art perfectly, which just goes to show how good Susanna is at creating this strange world of roaring tides, buried secrets and ever-watchful statues.

I was so comfortable with the character, Piranesi. It felt very much like I was walking with an old friend, who was showing me around his house and his favourite statues, telling me where to stand as the tides rushed in. Despite the vastness of the house and the secrets that are unburied, Piranesi's voice and the revelations he goes through is what really stuck with me when I closed the final pages.