Whitney > Recent Status Updates

I read this for the first time in high school and all I remember is liking it. Given the discourse online about this book, I’m going to read it again to see if I can spot anything fishy.

I haven’t started this book yet, but just realized that it is over 700 pages. No book, especially one in this series which focuses mostly on a half-baked love triangle, needs to be 700 pages. The first two books were engaging and the writing was great, but included very little world building.

Why do you need 700 pages if there’s no world building? Unfortunately, I will be going into this read as a skeptic.

I like it so far, despite Ella injuring her head at least three times in the first 50 pages. It strikes me as a random way to show that Ella is clumsy, but there are better ways to convey a character’s lack of coordinated than repeated concussions.

Good so far. I was a little nervous that the second time reading it would take away the magic that drew me in, but it doesn’t. I’m having a lot of fun picking up things that I missed the first time, like Xaden using his signet without Violet knowing.

I just got to the most famous quote from Babel which is something along the lines of “translation is first a foremost an act of betrayal”. This was greatly surprising as this line came from a character I did not anticipated.

This book is wonderfully engaging and wildly contradictory. The writing is amazing and the questions just keep piling up. I can usually tell when books will be 6-stars. This is it.

Big themes here: colonialism, white-savoior, racism, classism, and industrialism.

In typical R. F. Kuang fashion, this is going to be brutal. In the first few pages of the book, a boy of 11 is saved by a mysterious white man (most likely his father) and made to abandon his name, culture, and native language.

I cannot get through a singular page without having to look up at least one word. Part of this is because of the user of an older English vernacular but also because of the formality of writing. I feel like this is something that I will be able to get used to as I progress throughout the book.

I really detest the weird tension created when two characters love each other but cannot focus singularly on that fact. Persephone has decided she needs to leave and that’s the end of it, no matter that the lower city is the polar opposite from the upper city, that she feels like Hades’ house is her home, or that she is obsessed with him. The stubbornness annoys me.

It’s okay so far. Persephone is interesting I guess? Hades is a very flat character though.

The Hades + Persephone Retelling is a highly saturated market and, so far, this book isn’t giving me anything to grab onto. All the Greek Gods have the capability to be morally grey, but here, all the gods are evil except Hades. It’s almost insulting to the original story.