Well-developed magic system. Not good for a new fantasy reader, but amazing for those who love lore and keep diving into linguistics and the origins of words. ( )

A bit overextended at first but really built up a good head of steam as it went on. Totally worth a read, especially if you like somewhat subversive subversive and accessible fantasy written for adults. ( )

This novel is about as subtle as a brick in its themes of colonialism and capitalism but I did enjoy it. I thought the whole use of language to create magic was a brilliant idea in particular. ( )

3.5 stars!

Pretty dense and heavy handed as many reviewers have said in the past. Very academic tone, and definitely for linguistics nerds. It was hard to suspend belief because of this, and I couldn't really lose myself in the world, the 1830s setting, and the "magic". Definitely an interesting concept though, and I liked the characters. It's too bad this didn't end up being a series because the epilogue leaves a lot of interesting possibilities. ( )

The only positive part of this experience was reading the novel on my Kindle instead of buying the printed book – imagine carting around 500 pages plus the massive chip on the author’s shoulder! The negatives are almost as long as the footnotes. This is a nasty, bitter, patronising and oh so American bloated exercise in ego; I’m too old for BookTok, but I should know from previous experience to avoid a ‘Sunday Times bestseller’.

The history in which the fantasy plot is grounded is interesting and still important, but the author reduces colonialism and the British Empire to ‘white men are evil, people of colour are victims’ and mercilessly beats the reader over the head with her simplistic and modern perspective. She leans on actual historical events to the point of lecturing but also picks and chooses what information to include – for example, omitting that the United States also traded opium in China and inferring that the drug was banned in England while the British were ‘forcing opium on the Chinese at gunpoint.' Her take on history is literally black and white, with no shades of grey and no nuance.

The characters are equally flimsy, and the narrative is merely the 12” remix of ‘CoLoNiSeR!’ comments on X or, more likely considering the demographic, Tumblr. Robin, the half-Chinese main character, is little more than a more than a Watson figure used by the author to expound on her tedious and repetitive attack on British history. Ramy is Indian, Victoire is Afro-Caribbean and Letty is the coloniser in their midst (‘Proud, proper Letty with her stiff upper lip represented everything Ramy disdained about the English’). All they have in common – apart from Letty – is not being English. To fit in with the dystopian YA fiction vibe that makes this book so popular on TikTok and Tumblr, however, we are told that they are a found family : ‘By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.’ In fact, the whole novel is a masterclass in tell, don’t show, or instruction over implication. The exposition is often more absorbing than the plot, especially the etymology, but for the most part, the writing is more like a Wikipedia article (which requires sources) than fiction.

The plot veers between Dark Academia and a distorted revision of history, set in the 1830s but from a modern perspective – until very recently, ‘coloniser’ was the word for the people who lived in the colonies, but Kuang uses the term in the negative to mean ‘evil white people’ (the ‘British’ (English) are almost literally moustache-twirling pantomime villains). The dialogue is equally anachronistic, like a retelling of The Secret History but with corsets and carriages. If Kuang was smarter than she thinks, there could have been an element of dark humour and pastiche (‘DRUGGY MCDRUGGY WANTS HIS THUMBS IN CHINA’), but the author takes herself way too seriously.

I did appreciate the fantasy element of turning silver bullion into silver bars with magical properties, imbued with the meaning of words that can be lost in translation between languages, but Kuang doesn’t give the fantasy element enough space in between all the historical browbeating. And I disagree with the linguistic message of Babel – language isn’t a national treasury to be plundered by invading countries; new words and meanings are both coined and ‘borrowed’ and that’s how vocabulary grows and evolves. I was piqued into research by some of the topics raised in Kuang’s novel (the First Opium War, for instance), but found the reality far more fascinating than her reductive interpretation. ‘If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction,’ the author snarks in her introduction, and true, in a work of fiction, you can play with dates and inventions and have useless postgrads saving the world from the ‘frightening web of the colonial empire’, but this is a poor work of fiction, with characters I didn’t believe in or care about, excessive ranting, and a plot that boiled over from the author’s grudge against Oxford into a reworking of Les Miserables. ( )