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The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
Yet another romance novel about random nobody falling in love with the fictionalized crown prince of England, but I thought this was a particularly interesting one. Rather than being some flighty magical romance, the book shows the developing relationship over a span of about eight years, with time jumps as necessary to keep the story flowing. This has rooms for a lot of realistic ups and down that don't feel contrived but reflect some very flawed people making bad decisions and trying to learn from their mistakes. It also makes room for a lot of fun side characters: the leads meet at Oxford during a student exchange program, and the rest of Bex and Nick's Oxford cohort drift in and out of the story in interesting and fun ways. I particularly found this as a satisfying read as a counterbalance of Babel, which is also about a cohort at Oxford and the ways in which Oxford's ancient traditions apply powerful pressures on impressionable young people. I'm not saying the books were in any way similar, I'm just saying that everything that happens in Oxford in Babel is so momentous and history-shaping and is a statement about All of British Civilization, and it was nice to read a story where Oxford was something more frivolous.
Babel by RF Kuang
Very satisfying read. If you liked Ninth House, about how terrible Yale is, this does the same thing for Oxford. Or another comparison, this is the book I wanted Sorcerer to the Crown to be, in that both are the story of non-white children brought to 19th century England to take advantage of their magical gifts, only to discover that 19th century England is not capable of treating them with respect, and meanwhile is using their powers toward abusive ends. But in Babel, the competence of the heroes isn't enough to wave away problems, they still need to work, carefully and precisely, toward their ends. The narrative difficulty of success is a lot more like Baru Cormorant than STTC. But Babel is also, much more than any of the other books I just mentioned, a coming of age story and all the stuff Kuang includes about our heroes learning to become adults adds just one more satisfying layer of complication to their struggle. Also also, like The Magicians, Babel is fully of magic pedagogy meta!
That paragraph is full of comparisons to books I love; Needless to say I loved this. It was like a concentrated flavor bomb of everything I like in my fantasy literature: complicated cultural analysis, carefully reasoned magical systems, characters struggling against realistically envisioned political oppression, magic templated on and influenced by language. I'd like to throw in some comparisons to Neveryon, too, as the best fantasy ever written on the problems of imperialism and empire, but it's maybe a little forced... my biggest critique of Babel is it probably that unlike Neveryon, it needed a bit more sex. All of the characters are represented as largely sexless creatures of the mind, Professor Lovell has had two children with a woman not his wife and two children with his wife, but otherwise none of the professors are represented as having any kind of relationship to women and even Professor Lovell is not shown giving any thought to any of the numerous women in his life. and the saga of the relationships of our four protagonists is a story of endless repression and at most, prototypical Victorian longing, to wit Lettie's frustrated desire for Ramy and the narrative absence that is Victoire's relationship with Anthony. (There are already 37 works on AO3 tagged Ramy/Robin, as one ought to expect given the level of Victorian declarations of love the book contains between them)
My second biggest critique of Babel is that the plot is almost painfully straightforward. This is definitely not my biggest critique. It's basically fine that the plot is linear and focused on its protagonists and there isn't too much complexity off to the side moving the plot along, it lets Kuang focus on the things that she wants the book to be about. But I do think that the scheming and plotting of Parliament, the Chinese court, Babel, Hermes, and the various other power bases in the book could have given rise to a more interesting finale. As it is, Babel lands its finale successfully but it does so by not really leaving a lot of important questions open, or for that matter, characters alive.
Yet another romance novel about random nobody falling in love with the fictionalized crown prince of England, but I thought this was a particularly interesting one. Rather than being some flighty magical romance, the book shows the developing relationship over a span of about eight years, with time jumps as necessary to keep the story flowing. This has rooms for a lot of realistic ups and down that don't feel contrived but reflect some very flawed people making bad decisions and trying to learn from their mistakes. It also makes room for a lot of fun side characters: the leads meet at Oxford during a student exchange program, and the rest of Bex and Nick's Oxford cohort drift in and out of the story in interesting and fun ways. I particularly found this as a satisfying read as a counterbalance of Babel, which is also about a cohort at Oxford and the ways in which Oxford's ancient traditions apply powerful pressures on impressionable young people. I'm not saying the books were in any way similar, I'm just saying that everything that happens in Oxford in Babel is so momentous and history-shaping and is a statement about All of British Civilization, and it was nice to read a story where Oxford was something more frivolous.
Babel by RF Kuang
Very satisfying read. If you liked Ninth House, about how terrible Yale is, this does the same thing for Oxford. Or another comparison, this is the book I wanted Sorcerer to the Crown to be, in that both are the story of non-white children brought to 19th century England to take advantage of their magical gifts, only to discover that 19th century England is not capable of treating them with respect, and meanwhile is using their powers toward abusive ends. But in Babel, the competence of the heroes isn't enough to wave away problems, they still need to work, carefully and precisely, toward their ends. The narrative difficulty of success is a lot more like Baru Cormorant than STTC. But Babel is also, much more than any of the other books I just mentioned, a coming of age story and all the stuff Kuang includes about our heroes learning to become adults adds just one more satisfying layer of complication to their struggle. Also also, like The Magicians, Babel is fully of magic pedagogy meta!
That paragraph is full of comparisons to books I love; Needless to say I loved this. It was like a concentrated flavor bomb of everything I like in my fantasy literature: complicated cultural analysis, carefully reasoned magical systems, characters struggling against realistically envisioned political oppression, magic templated on and influenced by language. I'd like to throw in some comparisons to Neveryon, too, as the best fantasy ever written on the problems of imperialism and empire, but it's maybe a little forced... my biggest critique of Babel is it probably that unlike Neveryon, it needed a bit more sex. All of the characters are represented as largely sexless creatures of the mind, Professor Lovell has had two children with a woman not his wife and two children with his wife, but otherwise none of the professors are represented as having any kind of relationship to women and even Professor Lovell is not shown giving any thought to any of the numerous women in his life. and the saga of the relationships of our four protagonists is a story of endless repression and at most, prototypical Victorian longing, to wit Lettie's frustrated desire for Ramy and the narrative absence that is Victoire's relationship with Anthony. (There are already 37 works on AO3 tagged Ramy/Robin, as one ought to expect given the level of Victorian declarations of love the book contains between them)
My second biggest critique of Babel is that the plot is almost painfully straightforward. This is definitely not my biggest critique. It's basically fine that the plot is linear and focused on its protagonists and there isn't too much complexity off to the side moving the plot along, it lets Kuang focus on the things that she wants the book to be about. But I do think that the scheming and plotting of Parliament, the Chinese court, Babel, Hermes, and the various other power bases in the book could have given rise to a more interesting finale. As it is, Babel lands its finale successfully but it does so by not really leaving a lot of important questions open, or for that matter, characters alive.