handove's reviews
140 reviews

mentioned in acknowledgements

contentious one. i've liked all of rfk's previous work so i had clear expectations — beautiful prose, a fascinating magic system, at least one annoying character. she has this special quality to her writing so sometimes you don't even notice when the narrative drags because it's so well-written, like insanely well-written, which is what ended up saving the book.

katabasis chronicles postgrad alice's journey to save her advisor's soul for her recommendation letters (according to the first two pages, anyway), which sounds pretty ridiculous, but [rfk voice] she really really loves magick, okay. i liked alice as a character because of her conviction, but 90% of what we learn about her is all the lengths she goes to for magick and i think i would've connected to her more if someone bothered to explain better why she was so invested in it. girl just do physics atp

strangely i don't think that dampened my enjoyment too much. reiterating the fact that rfk writes gorgeously because this was unputdownable. that said. the book's solid plot was ruined a little by dragging in the middle and alice & peter's plot armor annoyed me. kuang reinvents hell in a way that makes it feel fresh even though it's literally just university. not kidding. pride is a fucking student center.

moving on! if i replaced peter with an intelligent talking burger the narrative would be three-quarters the same. he had zero flavour. his white ass probably tastes like baked beans. nevertheless i LOVED his and alice's banter like no you should not follow immanuel kant's advice on pretending to be in love when he died a virgin at age 79 alice you're right.

the magic — sorry, magick — system is based off logical paradoxes and just barely bends the laws of reality. every time a new paradox was introduced i got happy because they're so good to chew on. i've gone into wikipedia rabbit holes about this. this was a main component of the book and i still wanted more. if others' complaints about katabasis talking down to its readers was about this i will say i am known to— [gunshot]

final thoughts - the romance between alice & peter is lackluster and their reasons for avoiding/hating each other felt a little flimsy. also wished alice got a life. also wished this was longer because god rfk writes so well have i mentioned that yet

br w/ clover 

wouldn't say i adored this book but it was a good ride. i liked the commentary on the beauty industry & materialism & self-worth but thought it was pretty surface level; the highlight of the book was honestly the mc exploring her relationships with her parents (and the grief that came with those) and music. the writing was really lovely, with a sort of disconnected floaty tone that i enjoyed, but i don't think the horror elements were used to their full potential. it goes from 0 to 100 in the last quarter and the body horror is gross but lasts approximately three seconds. overall, i'm glad i read this at all but it was meh. so.

twelfth night modern retelling but olivia/viola endgame god this is everything i've ever wanted

that said. i do think this dragged a little in the middle and it ended up sitting on the backburner for a solid month (sorry 😭). short fun chapters to make you through it. i also think it would've benefitted from a little more closure but it was a good book overall, rec if you like messy protagonists in ya lol

the way this book keeps you engaged is that it always ends a section slyly referring to another event or incident which it then expands upon, which worked, but also made it feel like a very drawn-out dialogue. i was confused in the beginning but ishiguro did a good job at building up the details throughout so when the reveals came i wasn't surprised. overall, a little boring. didn't really love any of the characters and there wasn't the closure i wished for but well done.

i was going to be petty & write a terrible review for this after trctwt made me character of the day, but unfortunately it wasn't that bad so let's talk about it

spoilers ahead // tw abuse (canonical)

PLOT
the first plot point to be introduced in this book is blue's whole 'if you kiss your true love he'll die' thing and this is kind of the most YA thing i've ever read (derogatory). her debating whether to tell gansey/adam was very shallowly written and every time it mentioned a kiss i cringed like a 12 year old who just discovered romance novels

the second & more important plot point was the raven boys (especially gansey, and later blue also) trying to find glendower. this also includes the reveals about noah being dead, killed by their latin teacher, and also his death being a sacrifice so gansey survived. unfortunately i completely lost out on all of this because halfway through the book i thought wait i forgot everything and looked him up. moment of silence pls

i think this was...okay. like not many developments happened honestly and this definitely felt like a first book of a series in that aspect. i'm interested in how it develops throughout the series, could go a few different ways.

PACING
this was pretty fast-paced. or maybe it was just that it was split into 47 chapters, which is typical in YA and i didn't mind but did mess me up on the characters sometimes.

CHARACTERS
many have been waiting for this.

i like blue. i like blue!! a lot!!! she's hard-working and loyal and sassy and her name is so beautiful. blue sargent...one thing about me is that i love A's in names and i love it when g is pronounced as j. blue is such a pretty word to say too. i love her.

honestly, for the first 30% or so of the books i couldn't differentiate the three boys (ronan, adam, & gansey), i think partially due to it being split into short chapters and constantly swapping povs. i mixed up their motivations and situations a lot and that didn't rly contribute to me liking them.

i read gansey as neurodivergent/autistic - he often says what he doesn't mean, has trouble with his emotions, and masks a lot. however he is still a pissy white boy so what now

i liked adam. god this review sounds so boring. abused children in fiction are so loved by me i rly sympathized with him and i honestly do not remember much about him so we should leave it at that.

ronan was an asshole in the beginning, thoguh to be fair they all were, but i was more endeared to him later on when i learned that he had 428 baby bunnies and went into debt for them. or whatever. (note: i just looked up specifics about his raven and got spoilered from the fandom page again you would think i am a complete idiot.) i will say that twitter shoots for him a lot and that's the most neutral thing i can think of

i would like to take a moment here to touch upon the repugnant scene. nasty work, dick gansey the third. in fact screw you. i understand that he was frustrated and does actually care for adam, not just wanting to own him, but also...still a terrible thing to say! i don't think the timing (around 93% into the book, and notably only a little after ronan directly intervened in adam's abuse) did him a lot of favors.

i am looking up side character lists now. we should just bullet point this

do you notice what all these characters i just named have in common. don't guess i'm just gonna say it

OTHER
diversity
they're all fucking white lmao

i personally read blue as a woc and i've been told maggie stiefvater said retroactively she should have been written as one, but canonically that means she's white and wow this actually goes for every single character! there is not a single character specified to be non-white throughout this entire book as far as i remember. let me know if i'm wrong tho.

there are gay people tho listen to this. what in the faggotry. 

i just crashed out

romance
i should've made this its own category but i almost forgot it was there...i know endgame is blue/gansey (i just force-feminized the latter btw they are both girls <33) and there were a few moments. not much because i know it builds up over the trilogy but definitely not the focus.

and thank god for that bc i am exactly the sort of annoying gay person to say 'ew' out loud whenever a girl and a boy have a touching moment together

blue/adam feels wrong.

CONCLUSION
this felt very much like the typical first book in a series - laying the foundation, a bit mediocre, just engaging enough that i want to read the second. i have been thinking about their dynamics a lot today and i understand why some of y'all go crazy over this.

also GIDEON NAV REFERENCEEEE

i have many great annotations in my books app on this i just can't fit all of them there. gansey scratching the back of his head with a credit card was lowkey the funniest thing ever

that's all thank you for reading i should start a blog

plot was meh but it raised some interesting questions. fleshed out the characters a lot more than aart through changing povs.
adored miranda and maya's povs. i am too woke for andy.

this was cool, i was engaged the whole way and i don't rly think it dulled at any point. april's pov was a bit weirdly written at some points but those were easily ignored

okay this was so cute. i am on a lesbians in space kick and this was so lovely and a pleasure to read. there's some plot, some romance (which is more in the second half), some mystery and an ominous pov for a while. so. read it. and thank me

ouch!