ok. i gotta say it. least favourite r.f kuang book right here. which is crazy to say seeing as i haven’t finished the burning god but whatever.

first let me dunk on this book very briefly. i think this book has four  issues that hold it back from a perfect novel. 

one, rf kuang has set my expectations so high any imperfections seem so glaring when i adore her other works. 

two. this book is repetitive at times. when you have 546 pages, i imagine there would be some repetition. but at some point after hearing about how lovell sucks, about how babel sucks, about how colonialism is bad, how exploitation of the lower class for the profits of the upper class sucks, and how racism sucks… i wanted more. which kind of brings up the issue of this book not going deeper with its analysis. ok yes i get it white people are perpetrators of colonialism and racism to the highest degree. now let’s add some more depth to this conversation. Nope! let’s instead

make lovell an almost cartoonish villain, make letty turn on her friends when she had a “redemption arc” coming her way, and have no depth beyond how white people are racist. after a while it felt like every white character became a mythic antagonist. i’m not saying humanise the racists! they can get fucked! especially letty you can eat dog shit at this point. what i am saying is let’s go beyond these fundamentals. rf kuang i know you can do this.

. i don’t think i properly explained what i mean here and i don’t think i actually possess those words. idk i just wanted a deeper analysis of the points kuang raises in this book. and this seems to be the issue with all themes in this book. the theme is explored in a surface way, and then fail to dig deeper and instead we get the same line rewritten every 20 pages. RF KUANG YOU CAN DO BETTER.

this also leads me onto the fact that there is no nuance in this book. everything must be black or white. britain is good or britain is bad. lovell is good or lovell is bad. babel is good or babel is bad. i expected MORE than just surface-level conversations that i’d expect to see on twitter.

robin sucks. robin swift the character isn’t a bad guy, he’s just badly written. at points he goes from the most obvious audience surrogate in the world, to someone with wants dreams and aspirations, to yet again as fleshed out as cardboard. at points robin felt so raw and honest, and other times he felt like he was just doing and saying shit just because the plot beckoned him to, not because that’s what his character would do. because he has no character!!!!! gun to my head other than listing characteristics of robin (e.g orphaned, chinese, a babbler), i could not name you 3 traits he has. i mean i could say he’s a good friend and that’s it. 

and let me just say - this book is boring at times. straight up i did not care about this book until The Big Thing. like before that ok i was into this book, but i wasn’t gripped. there is no plot. there is no tension. and don’t sit here and tell me “oh it’s a school story at that point of course there’s no tension” SHUT UP. the poppy war’s school setting ate AND had a good plot. i don’t know what happened here shorty but it wasn’t great! it was fine. passable. tolerable. but not truly interesting. 

ok now ive shit on this book let me tell you what i DID i like.

ummm otherwise idk what to say. i mean i very clearly had a good time reading this. i was invested and will always adore rf kuang’s writing. but this? this is a fall from grace compared to the beauty that is the poppy war trilogy. 

i’m such a hater oh my god