heyyyy. hey hey hey. HEY. HEYYY. holy shit. rebecca kuang i could kiss you. 

i’ll be real, booktwt’s reaction to this terrified me. and honestly? i get why people wouldn’t like this. however i think it’s “flaws” are excusable or explained well-enough in the text for me to overlook so. YIPPEE.

ok let me start on the two main characters first — alice and peter. my loves. my pookies. i need fan art of them right this goddamn minute. alice was by far one of the best written characters’ i’ve seen in a while. because holy shit. she’s not only incredibly relatable, but she had extreme depth to her character to the point i almost felt like i knew her. like i almost feel like ive lost a close friend because now ive finished the book i won’t see my baby girl again. her character development actually went so fucking hard i also think it’s one of the best arcs ive read. i already miss alice and i just finished the goddamn book. peter was… ok. he had no character development or depth for like more than half of the book and out of nowhere he instantly became just as fleshed out as alice which i loved. i also love my baby boy. him and alice’s relationship was quite fascinating but imo i preferred when it was purely platonic (don’t give me shit for this spoiler one of the genres is romance 🤷). i do think their romantic relationship was built up well enough, it’s just a personal thing for me. i preferred when they were ribbing each other in every convo lol. i do say as well what happens with the Kripkes defo helped turn the tide towards my opinion of peter, as tbh before that i was ready to straight up beat his ass. 

the overall plot was… Ok! i do think if you’re going into this book for the plot you’re setting yourself up to hate it. this is a book about alice and peter, and hell is just the setting which drives alice and peter’s thoughts, feelings & actions. i do think the plot kept me gripped up until the second court, but ill be honest the minute we moved on from that i was a bit… bored. it felt like they were kind of just pissfarting around. but in the later stages of the book i reflected and realised that all that Nothing kind of had to happen in order for alice and peter’s characters to grow. i will say it defo was slightly difficult at the time to stay interested, but its not like absolutely nothing happens either. i’m someone who needs tension to be interested in a story, and although there wasn’t any for a certain chunk, kuang instead interlaced the story with such banger philosophical thoughts that looking back on it im actually not as mad about it, and the more i read of this “boring” chunk, i was less and less bothered until i was having a great time. 

the worldbuilding is difficult for me to sum into one word. on one hand, kuang’s take on hell draws on past interpretations with a novel spin with unique elements. i did like the first court’s interpretation, was a bit meh on the second court as there was a predictable theme the courts seemed to be following, but then after there it all kind of just fell apart. yet again there was an in-universe explanation for this, so im not annoyed or anything, but idk i expected more. the eighth court was intriguing, but defo not to the level of the first two. 

i do think there is one issue i can’t really look past as i have with the others. and that’s the fact there were a lot of instances of deus ex machina’s that i simply couldn’t overlook because they threw me out of the text. the ending could be described as one, but i do think what happened was not only built up well before it happened, but it made sense with alice & peter’s character developments, so im not mad at that. i actually loved the ending. but there’s a couple of instances where alice and/or peter are isolated and put into a situation where they cannot escape, and then Random Hell Citizen Number One saves them. and idk it felt like lazy writing at times. why are you only introducing this now where the only purpose is to save them and then after it’s irrelevant!!! i don’t know if that makes sense but i don’t want to be too specific because i want to make this (mostly) Spoiler Free.

ok there’s two last things im gonna comment on because i seriously can just yap forever. i love love loved the academia in this book. idk why but reading this whilst in my third-year was so fucking funny because yeah. all of it is so silly yet also so soul consuming. and idk i felt like i could relate. and plus the whole concept of magick? HELLO? so unique, so fleshed out, so fresh…

oh r.f. kuang. your mind. yet another banger. it’s defo not my favourite book of hers, as the poppy war will always stay winning, but damn was this good. a beautiful love child of babel and yellowface.