I FINISHED KATABASIS! We need to talk...

I did it! I finished Katabasis and here I am with my early (spoiler-free) review!

I FINISHED KATABASIS! We need to talk...

Y’all, I have spent the last week of my life being threatened on the internet. And I don’t mean in the way I am usually threatened on the internet. If my comment sections are to be believed, I should be on high alert because there are bandits surveyling my house as we speak, just waiting for me to leave my copy of Katabasis too close to an open window! Well, HA! Jokes on them! I live in the Midwest and we don’t even open our windows until at least June! lol.

If that joke didn’t land, please understand that my faucets are currently dripping so that my pipes don’t freeze. That’s how cold it is. Send help.

Anyway, you’re not here for my witty banter. You want the deets.

Did I like Katabasis?

Let’s talk about it:

Now, I want you to brace yourself, because this is not a social media post. This is my Bindery, so we are going to get into the nitty gritty here. That alright? Awesome. But I will do my best to do so without spoiling the story for you!

Katabasis follows two Cambridge graduate students—Alice Law and Peter Murdock. They are not only classmates, but joint protegee under one of the most celebrated magicians in the world—Professor Grimes. But when Grimes dies in a magical accident, they both decide to venture into hell to save him, despite the fact that neither of them like him…or each other. In order to rescue him, they will have to wrestle through past conflict so that they can effectively work together to traverse hell’s dangerous landscape and find their professor before he reaches peace and is recycled for reincarnation.

Now let’s talk about my feelings on the story.

As usual, Kuang’s writing is beautiful. She pulled me into this world without any effort at all. From the very first chapter, I was sold on the characters, the magic system, their mission, the problems ahead of them, and I knew that I would be committed to seeing them through their journey. Kuang has a gift for inviting me into a character’s perspective and allowing me to really lose myself in their story. And that gift was in full effect during Katabasis.

I not only fully believed both Alice and Peter’s unique voices, but I found myself sympathizing with both of them as their perspectives and memories clashed. Especially when—don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything—a major part of their character arc became them each approaching past interactions from their own limited perspectives. I could fully understand how each of them had contributed to the distance between them, as well as how each of them had been failed by the other. Their voices were so unique and so full that there was space on the page for each of them to grip my attention and demand my loyalty.

With that said, equal to her gift of bringing her characters to life, Kuang also has a habbit of not fully trusting us—the readers—to pull back the veil and to see the layers of complexity she’s woven into her characters on our own. Several times, I found myself reading through memories and recollections that were meant to tell me things about Alice and Peter—and Professor Grimes—that I had already figured out by just listening to the well-crafted voices she had given them from the beginning. Similarly to Babel and Yellowface, I felt that RF Kuang told me a masterful story, while pulling me close and repeating any details she thought I might miss if she weren’t careful. And for a less meticulous writer, maybe that is helpful. But Kuang’s Characters are beautifully complex and strong-voiced. So it wasn’t necessary.

With that said, I think Katabasis will be another massive success.

I do anticipate there will be some lively online discourse about the repesentation in the story, though. Particularly the way that disability and mental health are handled. While it is clear Kuang put great care into letting us see these realities from as many angles as possible, she did seem to prioritize approaching conversations around them honestly—meaning in the character’s honest voices—over prioritizing how the conversations will impact readers. Which I do not necessarily think is a bad thing, nor do I necessarily think she handled them poorly. But I do think perhaps she handled them more heavy handidly than she would have if those priorities were swapped. So go in aware that these subjects will be heavy to read through.

If you plan to pick up Katabasis, I do encourage you to go in knowing that this story handles some very heavy topics, and it does so in great detail. Our characters are walking through hell, watching as people suffer for their failures in life, and that pushes them to reexamine their own struggles, traumas and feelings. And a lot of their conversations and character-development centers their very heavy experiences: such as chronic pain, disability, anxiety, suicidal ideations, sexual assault (with vivid, though not graphic, descriptions), verbal abuse, death and mortality.

Overall, I had a very good experience with this book and I would highly encourage you to pick it up and to give it a read when it comes out. It spends real time tackling big questions about power and what it actually looks like, who has the right to wield it, and whether it is worth resisting when those who use it against you also have the power to help you attain it yourself. Which, from powerlessness, feels like an easy question to answer. But when you are handed the possibility of power, while holding the identity of someone society has deemed unworthy to wield it, how safe are you to resist the abuses of those who are “helping” you get free?

Really consider this story’s premise. For Alice and Peter—each of whom hold marginalizations that keep them from being “worthy” of power—being trained and endorsed by the greatest magician alive is worth any cost. Even the risk of eternal damnation. They were willing to travel to hell, itself, to rescue a man they despise, based solely on the power he has over them and the way that power has effected their view of themselves. (We will talk about this much more in depth once the book is out.)

What does that suggest about the way that power and marginalizion intersect? Is there actually an avenue to escape if the cost of escaping is being bound to people whom you cannot survive without?

These are the kinds of questions Kuang wrestles with in Katabasis and I am HERE FOR IT. Do you hear me?

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. But I just finished the book an hour or two ago, so who knows what I’ll think once I’ve had some time to sit with it!

If you have not already purchased a copy and you'd like to now, I encourage you to use the link attached to this post, as it links directly to my storefronts. Thank you so much!

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Michael

4

Jan 23

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