Format: Print 

I don't give away specific spoilers but please be aware I allude to certain events and you should read on with caution if you haven't read this yet.

It took 400 pages for something to grip me enough that I wasn’t having to force myself through two chapters of this a day. And the really frustrating thing? I thought those last 150 pages were really good – I was invested in the story, I kept having to catch myself from looking ahead to see how the book ended – but it should not have taken anywhere near 400 pages for me to get to that point. 

Genuinely until then, I was reading two chapters a day and they were a slog. And every time I finished a ‘Book’ I would put Babel down and it would take me days to pick it back up again. Ok, things did start to improve from the 300 page mark but not enough to make up for how slow it had been up to that point. To clarify longer books don’t concern me – in fact a few weeks ago I finished a book exactly the same length in 23 hours – but something about this just made it drag. 

It could have been the footnotes. Why, just why, were they there? If it’s that important, work it into the main book somehow. They took me out of the story and they felt like an opportunity for the author to share all of her knowledge, but they didn’t actually add anything for me personally. But I’ve read two books with footnotes this month and in neither case did the footnotes do anything to increase my enjoyment, or give me any information that I felt was essential to understand the book. And side note to the publisher, using an asterisk in this case did not work. 95% of the time I missed it in the text and then had to go back and find where the footnote was relevant when I got to the end of a page and hadn’t come across it. They were too small. 

It could have been the characters. They weren’t unlikeable. But I also couldn’t root for them because they all became so bound up in the etymology lectures, that until that thing that happened around the 400 page mark, I just didn’t care enough about them. 

It could be the fact that an opportunity was missed to do something really innovative with the world building here. I’ve seen a few reviews talk about how this isn’t a fantasy world, but instead uses magic to explain things that already existed. And I completely agree. There needed to be more for me to truly understand why that magic system had become so engrained in life, and it just didn’t do that. Instead, all I was doing was thinking about how that magic system had the potential to completely mess up the world. 

There are other things I could say but I don’t want to be overly critical because I can see that it tells an important story. I did enjoy those last 150 pages but sadly it just wasn’t enough by that point. This isn’t an unexpected review. I went into this knowing it probably wasn’t for me. And I was proved completely right for the first 300-400 pages. And yet, had it been 200 pages shorter, with less of that build up, I could see myself giving this 3 and maybe even 4 stars.