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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9761853" data-attributes="member: 78087">Katabasis by R F Kuang is very much what you'd expect from the author of Babel, Yellowface, and The Poppy War. It's very much based on Kuang's two obvious passions - debate and academia - wrapped in mythology and fantasy, coloured by her two years in Cambridge and Oxford.Alice Law is a Chinese-American student of magic at Cambridge who decides to go to Hell to retrieve her PhD supervisor when he's killed in a magical accident, so that she can pass her PhD viva. So far, so one-liner. Law is very much a Kuang protagonist - apart from the obvious personal parallels to Kuang herself (currently doing a PhD at Yale), she has that teenage nihilism and single-minded obsession with being special and worthy that's very recognisable from her other books.Despite this, it's probably the book of hers I liked the least so far (apart from The Poppy War books, which are basically "I just found out about the Opium Wars and the Japanese occupation of China RAARGH"), because Alice's insights into how terrible her life decisions to date have been come too late. The descriptions of academic Hell are... well-researched but not enough to have much charm. It's all very Ars Magica, honestly, and not in a good way. Lincoln in the Bardo this isn't.</blockquote>