Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“I have everything I ever wanted–and it tastes just as delicious as I always imagined.”

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

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I love an unreliable narrator. Whether they are divorced from reality à la Montresor of “The Cask of Amontillado,” deceiving themselves as a defense against trauma, like Pi in Life of Pi, or intentionally deceiving the reader, as in many mysteries I won’t name to avoid spoilers. . .I just can’t get enough of them. What intrigues me about June Hayward (aka Juniper Song) in Yellowface is I’m never certain how much of her own press she buys into. She definitely believes she’s been screwed […]

“Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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What do you do when your graduate advisor dies, but you still need a letter of recommendation? Apparently, you travel to Hell to retrieve his soul and his recommendation along with it. Rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are Cambridge graduate students studying Magick. When a spell gone awry kills their advisor, Professor Grimes, they decide they have no choice but to journey to the underworld to save their academic careers. What follows reads like an homage to Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had been a […]

Everybody’s Talking at Me

Babel by R F Kuang

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  Britain has a problem. It’s struggling to find its place in a shifting world order which is made even more difficult by its inability to have any real societal discussions on its imperial legacy. Our schools and entire educational system were built to churn out good colonial administrators, able to manage an empire but not think about the suffering of the peoples enslaved by it. It also has a rich folkloric history, one of magic and the supernatural. R. F. Kuang’s Babel brings those […]

“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis: A Novel by R. F Kuang

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Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld Alice Law has but one goal: to become one of the greatest in the field of Magick; to make all the sacrifices (her pride, her health, her love life, her self-respect, and most of all her sanity) worthwhile. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. (And one of the worst humans; but what does a vicious personality and a tendency to drive others to […]

In Which Grad School is Worse Than Hell

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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I was mildly apprehensive about reading this because mixed audience reviews came out after I preordered it, but it was great. Kuang does character psychology very well, and that stood out more than anything else. Except for one chapter, the POV character is Alice, graduate student in Analytical Magick at Cambridge. When her piece-of-work advisor Jacob Grimes dies in an accident she blames herself for, she goes to Hell to fetch him—not out of selflessness but because she needs him to finish her degree. Her […]

Going to hell to finish school

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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I could not get more than halfway through R. F. Kuang’s Babel. The world and magic system were amazing; I could not stay interested in all the character personal drama. Thus I was hesitant to try Katabasis. I finally did though, as I have some experience in the world of higher education as well as the Classical background to appreciate that title reference. On the other hand, that didn’t help The Secret History; hated that, mostly because of the stupid unlikeable character drama. Tragedy in […]



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