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R.F. Kuang
When their thesis advisor dies, two rival doctoral candidates in magic at Cambridge University decide to venture into hell to rescue him, since they need his letters of recommendation. Alice and Peter must make their way through an academic inferno in which each level is a grotesque parody of theses, defenses and office politics. A fantasy novel of ambition, scholarship and the price of academic success.
- Edition
- HarperVoyager
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Format
- Physical
- Pages
- 559
My thoughts
3.25/5 🌟 painfully average. disappointing self insert. usually, i do love a unique premise (academic rivals going to hell), and a conversation of something common (academia being personified as hell) and it all had so much potential, it really did. i thoroughly enjoyed the unprecedented levels of info dump and name dropping (rfk’s usual ways) but this lacked a good enough moving storyline to go along with that. Babel’s info dumps were more fun to read because they were adding to the journey of the plot unlike here where it was just a farce to show everyone how much more well read she is than the average person. or if it wanted to be a character exploration of people in academia (without much substance to the plot) it lacked in that too. definitely a miss this one, despite having a historically proven intriguing premise. :(
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