I read Yellowface earlier this year and disliked it, so when my book club chose to read Babel I was anything but excited. I wanted to give it a try anyway because dark academia is way more up my alley than girlie Contemporary. I was even more disappointed than I thought I would be. The characters and emotions are so flat and devoid of real emotion it verges on robotic. The foot notes added nothing to the story, and felt very much like she was trying to copy Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (unsuccessfully).

Because I know Kuang's other book, The Poppy War, is a sweeping epic fantasy and all of these are very different genres, I really feel that she is just writing books with trendy aesthetics to sell her otherwise uninteresting plots and lackluster writing . Throw in some commentary on racism and these sound like important, progressive, and entertaining reads. However, they fall far short of what you would expect from the description.