Catabasis

I found out how much I love magical realism the end of this year with reading Catabasis and the Everlasting and I want to read so much more. I love it.

I just found this book to be pretty lifeless, ironically, and boring, honestly, despite journeying through hell. The stakes were very low, the magic system was very underutilized, hell itself felt mostly like an empty void and not like a really interesting, fascinating place for us to explore and I could not stand our protagonist Alice whose internalized misogyny was completely out of control.

She uses dark academia to tell a beautiful, beautiful love story. And she uses it to explore her own academic interests.

The way the hell landscape works in this book, it's very, very creative. Not only is it, you know, physically a landscape, this depiction of hell could also be altered through logic and thinking. And I found that was just so creative.

When the critique I've heard a lot is people saying that the author is condescending. And I think that to me it was obvious that it was the character and the world of academia that is condescending.

I've already started reading it, and it's already phenomenal. I don't want to say it, but it feels like a five-star. It feels like a five-star already.

There were moments that I was more invested than others, and I did want to see how it ended. So, overall, I would give this like a 2.5 out of five stars.

I just didn't realize how much R of Korn was going to reference Inferno. So I'm a little bit annoyed that I didn't read Inferno before Catabasis.