aerielpembroke

Katabasis releases at the end of August. I read an advance copy.

I have to conclude that R. F. Kuang's fiction is just not to my taste. This is the first book of hers that I even managed to finish, having previously given up on both Babel (anvillicious, with anvillicious footnotes) and The Poppy War (boring) quite early on. However, a lot of my customers love her books, so I will buy and sell multiple copies of this one.

The structure and concept of Katabasis is quite appealing. Alice Law is at magic college, obsessively determined to succeed. When exploitative working conditions lead to her making a mistake that gorily kills her mentor Professor Grimes, Alice still needs his recommendation... so she goes to Hell to fetch him back! She's followed by another student, Peter, who is a perfect genius who she doesn't realize is in love with her. Their journey through Hell takes up almost all of the book, interspersed by flashbacks to college.

Lots of people will undoubtedly love this book. I found it thuddingly obvious and lacking in charm. The humor was mildly amusing at best. The magic is boring and highly technical. Alice is frustratingly oblivious, self-centered, and monomaniacal - which is clearly a deliberate character choice, but I did not enjoy reading about her. Hell was boring - how do you make Hell boring?!

Spoilery reveal about Peter: ( Read more... )

The entire book, I felt like I was sitting there twiddling my fingers waiting for Alice to figure out that it's not okay for college to be exploitative and abusive, that it was bad for Professor Grimes to have sexually assaulted her, that Peter loved her, and that success isn't everything. Though at least it didn't have anvillicious footnotes [1] like Babel!

[1] Legally and morally, Professor Grimes sexually assaulted Alice. It is common for survivors of sexual assault to not recognize it as such at the time, especially when the assault involves an abuse of power. [2]

[2] It is an abuse of power for a professor to make any sexual overture to a student, even a seemingly consensual [3] one.

[3] Due to the power differential, no sexual relations between a professor and a student can ever be truly consensual.

I will continue to stock Kuang's books but this is probably the last time I will attempt to actually read one.

I do love the cover.

This book has a hilarious premise: a single woman's attic suddenly starts producing husbands! A husband comes down from the attic of Lauren's London flat, and she's instantly in an alternate reality in which she married that guy. The decor of her flat shifts, sometimes her own body or job shifts depending on whether she now works out regularly or some such, and sometimes there's wider ripple effects. Lauren is always aware of the changes, but no one else is. If the husband goes back into the attic, he vanishes and a new husband comes down.

I adore this premise, and the book absolutely commits to it. It is 100% about husbands coming down from the attic. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the way it explored the premise. It's largely a metaphor for dating in a time when you can swipe on an internet profile and instantly get rid of a possible match, so Lauren cycles through hundreds of husbands, often rejecting them at a glance, and we only ever get to know a very small number of them. Of the ones we do get to know, they're mostly fairly one-note - handsome and nice and American, handsome and nice but chews with his mouth open, handsome and nice but boring, or mean and hard to get rid of. The falling Ken dolls cover is apt in more ways than one. Lauren is also pretty one-note - shallow and frantic.

I also had an issue with the pacing. There's so much repetition of the same actions. A husband comes down, Lauren examines her text messages and photos for evidence of their history together, Lauren calls her friends to see what they know about him. A husband comes down, Lauren takes one look at him and sends him back. Some of this is funny but it gets old. The book felt at least 50 pages longer than it needed to be.

I would have liked the book a lot more if there had been way fewer husbands, and more time spent with each one. I never really got a sense of what Lauren wanted in a man, apart from some surface-level characteristics, or what she wanted in life. Her lives were also generally not that different, which didn't help.

There was one part that I really liked and was actually surprising.

( Read more... )

Rec by Naomi Kritzer, who liked it more than I did. But thanks for the rec! It was an interesting read, and not one I'd have found by myself.

My absolute favorite alternate lives story remains the novella And Then There were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker, available free online at that link.

Recent DNFs (Did Not Finish)

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, by Clay McLeod Chapman



A horror novel about - I think - how a Q-Anon analogue turns people into literal zombies. I couldn't get into this book. I don't think it was bad, it just wasn't my thing. I didn't vibe with the prose style at all.

The Baby Dragon Cafe, by A. T. Qureshi



A woman opens a cafe that's also a baby dragon rescue. I adored the idea of this book, not to mention the extremely charming cover, but the execution left a lot to be desired. It was just plain dull. I dragged myself through two chapters, both of which felt eternal, then gave up. Too bad! I really wanted to like it, because the idea is delightful.

In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens, by Richard Waitt



This ought to have been exactly my jam, except for the author's absolutely bizarre prose style, which is a combination of Pittman shorthand and Chuck Tingle's Twitter minus the sense of humor, with an allergy to articles and very strange syntax. I literally had no idea what some of his sentences meant. This weirdness extends to direct quotes from multiple people, making me suspect how direct they are. And yes, this was traditionally published.

Here are some quotes, none of which make more sense in context:

It contrasts the chance jungle violence with lava flows off Kilauea - so Hollywood but predictable.

"The state's closure seems yours. Have I missed something?"

[And here's a bunch of Tinglers.]

Heart attack took Eddie in 1975.

These years since wife Eddie died Truman's fire has cooled.

Since wife Eddie died, Rob is the closest he has to a friend.

Since wife Eddie died, Truman has been a bleak recluse, the winters especially lonely.