2022 book 112

 R.F. Kuang's Babel

So this has been pretty hyped up, and I was psyched to sink into a 500+-page historical fantasy novel about magic using languages, but this didn’t totally work for me. I was into it at first—the protagonist is a young Chinese boy in the 1820s on the verge of death from a plague that’s killed his whole family, when he is saved by a British academic who's been sending him books and making him learn English all his life (it becomes clear quickly that this is his father, who refuses to acknowledge him and seems to have impregnated the boy's mother for experimental reasons, and honestly that is the bummer vibe of this whole book). Anyway his horrible father trains him up in languages so he can go to the exclusive translation program at Oxford, where he makes friends! Hooray! But everyone is super racist/sexist/colonial to all the non-white students. And then he discovers there's a secret society with more radical political aims in mind… and then things take a darker turn, content warning for violence and torture. I don’t know why this didn’t work for me, I don’t know if I needed it to be more subtle or less of a bummer or what. (But I think that is the point, that is not subtle and IS a bummer.) There are lots of great moments and ideas but it was all a bit disjointed in the second half. And I needed more from the end. I think this book will haunt me for a while but that’s not the vibe I’m looking for right now. B+.

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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in August.