Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she's going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams.
There are new things here. The journey into hell has been done, but it hasn’t been done quite the way R. F. Kuang does it ... We’re once again treated to the power of Kuang’s mind. It takes a smart person to write geniuses, and Alice and Peter are brilliant, if blinkered ... A more mature and less showy novel than Kuang’s earlier work ... Hell filtered through a scholar’s eyes.
The novel dives deep into painful and all-too-real experiences ... The revelation of what Peter’s breezy genius actually costs him is one of the most compelling and gratifying elements of the story, and the gradual peeling away of Alice’s prickly exterior is equally rewarding ... The way Kuang captures Alice’s desire for oblivion is one of the more impressive threads of the book ... I’ve never seen that state of being captured quite so well ... There’s some minor repetition ... Katabasis shines with devastatingly real characters and absorbing world building. Kuang’s sentences are delicious, her insights well-earned and deeply affecting. She’s also funny ... Katabasis isn’t always easy, but it is always enjoyable, and that’s a near impossible feat. Only a writer as thoughtful and skilled as Kuang could make a literal journey through hell so fun and so poignant.
Hell hath no fury in this bloated epic, which dawdles like a graduation ceremony, long and soporific ... Stunted by Kuang’s fussy and verbose magic system ... Instead of immersive environments and scenes, Kuang offers tedious problem sets that lack narrative tension. ... Kuang’s dialogue veers on the parodic. The characters explain, cite and ruminate more than they experience and act ... The constant allusions demonstrate Kuang’s scholarship but obstruct the storytelling ... [Kuang] struggles this time to maintain any narrative rhythm ... Never gripping ... The failure to think about the real materiality of life and death is the biggest disappointment of Katabasis.
