I read this one rather close to the release date so am a little fuzzy on details – but I had a book club on it this weekend which has helped me clarify my thoughts.
While I still liked this novel, my immediate reaction was also that this was my least favorite Kuang novel, especially after Babel and Yellowface. Even with that, there are so many interesting thoughts and ideas being explored that it’s worth the read, and has quite a few tongue-in-cheek moments (like people being in hell for “I have a comment, not a question”).
I think part of the challenge or issue may have simply been my expectations: a journey through hell? Of course I want a detailed exploration of each of the nine levels, and we don’t really get that. The first two levels and the final level are fleshed out but exploring how people are tortured in hell is very much not the point: Kuang wants to use this to explore power structures and dynamics, cycles of abuse and how victims in some cases even enable or justify their abuse by glorifying the abuser, and trying to give it some greater purpose to explain why it happened. The journey through hell involves a lot of the landscape outside the levels themselves.
Alice was a difficult character to follow because there are so many times when she is close to getting it but shies away from the truth, trying to tell herself the white lie, “not like other girls,” having internalized the systemic abuse.
There are some interesting asides, and I quite liked Peter (and the cat) but this wasn’t one of those books that has a very fast paced plot, making one stay up for another chapter. It is more of a slow read, with lots of themes for a discussion and further analysis.
