A tale of four caricatures, ah, excuse me, characters. This joke is funny because the two words are so similar! Sometimes, humor can be based on LANGUAGE. This is a novel about words. GET IT.

Did that annoy you? If so, you can probably skip this one, because this is how it feels to read <i>Babel</i>.

Kuang writes her four characters as if she has never had a friend but she has a pretty good idea what it's like to have one based on some children's cartoons. Their friendship is repeatedly revealed to be based on proximity and outsider status and there is no emotion between any of them.

Also. I should not have been shocked that Letty betrayed them, and I certainly should not have been forced to read an interlude that explains her motives. In an over 500 page book, maybe a couple of them should be devoted to character development. Just a thought.

They all speak with the same voice, which I can only assume is Kuang's voice based off of the dry footnotes. (And listen. I love a gimmicky footnote. LOVE THEM. But these truly make it feel like a textbook, not a novel, and Kuang utterly fails to remedy this.)

I paid full price at my local bookstore (you're welcome, Changing Hands) for this so I had to finish it, but despite the lovely shelf appeal it's going right back as a used book.

I really wanted to like this. I love dark academia, I love language, I love an unexpected murder that makes everyone's brains drop out of their heads (though these guys really take the cake on being whiny disasters:

Anthony shows up and says "You can relax now. The grown-ups are here." AND THEY ARE ALL HAPPY?! Spineless bores. And still eighty five pages later our boy Robin finally has the realization that this isn't a game and there are lives at stake.

). But it's so dull. I'm being told to care about human rights issues as if anyone willing to shell out twenty seven ninety nine plus tax for a book on how translation is magic doesn't already believe in human rights. Kuang doesn't know her audience, she doesn't know how to write realistic friendships, and her entire attempt at world building boils down to "it's England, but like, magic, and, racism is definitely the worst haha, and anyway this world is DEFINITELY DIFFERENT but not different enough to make this supposedly alternate history any different from the real history oh look over there, another translation because I'm hashtag educated."

At the end of the day, all the major events of this book happened in our world and Kuang didn't bother to invent anything else. This book's greatest weakness is that it's too historically accurate for me to believe that anything they do matters. It's a real shame. The introduction tells you everything you need to know about this book: Kuang is more concerned about historical accuracy and what her readers think than anything so mundane as character or plot.

It feels like she just wanted to write a story at her alma mater in which translators are the heroes, and language research was more important to her than a good story.