Thank you for the chance to read the digital ARC, Harpercollins international

Katabasis for me has been an experience similar to reading Babel: the beginning was interesting and full of potential, the ending was engaging, but the whole middle part did not always work.

All the academic stuff in both books did actually interest me but - in this novel more than in Babel - it was not always included organically into the story. Personally, sometimes I felt thrown out of the events by the amount of information thrown my way, despite being interesting and challenging in its own way.

The way Kuang created Hell made it intricate, vivid and compelling in some instances but dull in others.

I felt a similar way towards the characters, Alice and Peter and their relationship either captured me or felt like behind a wall, and I as a reader couldn't really accompany them in their journey but only look from a distance.

The themes are definitely there: sexism in academic spaces, the meaning of life, what it means to be alive vs just surviving, being affected by a chronic illness that affects every aspect of your life, and probably some of the author's experience in her academic journey.

So, in conclusion, the book has some very interesting aspects and the project was surely ambitious, but the way it's all put together ended up in a reading experience full of ups and downs for me, so in all honesty I can't say it met my expectations.

3.5 Amazing concept. I liked the idea of the story and was interested to see each level/ challenge the characters went through. There were a lot of times I was taken out of the story with an info dump/lesson.

Rounded up from 4.5 stars

Two Cambridge grad students take a journey through hell (literally) to save their professor - not because he doesn't deserve to be there, but because they both need him in order for their academic careers to advance.

Thank you for the ARC!

I loved this book! The analytical academic approach to magic was very interesting. I loved the tie-in of real-world philosophy and classics too! I could see that being alienating to anyone Peter and Alice were such beautifully broken people, and it was a treat getting to know them. I've walked in Alice's shoes (not to Hell, but I've had my own Grimes unfortunately) and I thought Kuang did such a good job of mapping the faults and traps of her psyche. I think there was more depth to be had there, but I liked what I got. I found Alice and Peter unlikable, but I liked them (paradox....). I thought the flashbacks were richly textured and added much, but had the unfortunate side effect of making the Hell segments feel a bit dull at times. Hell was amazing in the beginning--Peter and Alice's strained awkwardness versus the unknowable bowels of Hell was an incredible dynamic. As time went on, I found myself wishing that we spent more time with them in the present moment than in flashbacks. I also wished that Hell was more of an active character in the book, for al the build-up there was about what it does to the soul. Felt more like a set piece for Peter and Alice to gawp at than something that challenged them to progress or test their limits.

The ending seems to be dividing people but....I am a sap and I can actually be lured with Orpheus and Eurydice parallels. I loved it. I had an amazing time with this book and I would love to own it once it comes out. The ways in which academia breaks you and you honor it are so specific and Kuang captured it so beautifully.

R.F. Kuang is back with another philosophical, erudite, dark academia fantasy. Alice Law, determined to be one of the most brilliant minds in the field of Magick, descends into hell to retrieve her professor, Jacob Grimes, after an accident that may be her fault caused his untimely death. Alice is joined by Peter Murdoch, Grimes' other student, once he realizes that Alice is going to hell. As the two journey through the Eight Courts in search of Grimes' soul, they must confront their own motives and faults. While the momentum for Katabasis occasionally lost its footing by switching between the present and backstory flashbacks, Kuang's prose and the ending was more than satisfying. There were delightful twists, and I really loved Peter. Overall, a must read for fans of Kuang's work.

I love R. F. Kuang. While I would've preferred to do immersive reading for this one (no alc on netgalley), I enjoyed it all the same. I can't wait to read it again with the audiobook once it releases. Rebecca writes such intriguing characters and stories that brings you right into the book. It was perfect

Thank you to R,F. Kuang and NetGalley for emotionally devastating me yet again!! What an amazing novel. This was terrifying, sad, tense, and a hopeful piece. The amount of research that must have went into this makes me wish to see some form of bibliography. I can't wait for everyone to read this.

After hearing so much about R.F. Kuang, I was excited to dip my toes into reading Katabasis as my first novel by her. This book was mysterious and adventurous as we are focusing on two characters who are trekking through hell to find their professor. I loved the academic aspects of the novel and how the two characters have this competitive/unfriendly relationship towards each other. While I found many aspects of this book entertaining and well written, other times I felt bored and like the characters were just trekking through the same landscapes over and over. If the book cut 100 pages of them just walking through hells’ landscape I think this could have been a page turner. Overall, I liked the writing style and will be giving more of R.F. Kuang’s books a shot.

R. F. Kuang continues to deliver. Loved every bit of this even more than Babel, which was one of my favorites from that year. Lovers of fantasy should absolutely be adding this one to their "to be read" lists.

This is a very creative book, with obvious attention to research and detail. I really liked the premise, and wanted to know what would happen next. It was hard to guess! I also enjoyed the in-depth discussions of philosophy, but found them to be a bit long and in the way of the story itself at times. I wouldn't call this my favorite work by Kuang, but I enjoyed reading it all the same.

Katabasis is exactly as advertised based on its comp titles—Dante’s Inferno meets Piranesi—but its execution doesn’t quite live up to either of those works for me. Alice and Peter weren’t immediately compelling protagonists, but as their characters were explored a bit more, they became more sympathetic and layered. Still, I wanted more interaction between these characters in the present part of the narrative. The real standout character for me, though, was Professor Grimes. His motivations and actions were consistently clear and well-developed throughout the novel, and he is such a great example of an unlikable but utterly compelling character.

Kuang’s conception of hell starts with a lot of promise, and it was fun to trace where she chose to stay with and diverge from Dante. As the journey progressed, though, the setting mostly loses focus, and hell becomes increasingly bleak and forgettable. The plot itself was good; the subject matter and themes were presented very clearly and there were moments that elicited strong tension, elation, and despair while I was reading. The pacing was a little strange, however, as a good deal of the book’s important moments occur in flashbacks that interrupt the action. While these moments provide crucial context to characters’ actions, it feels like there could have been another way to structure things that didn’t throw off the story’s momentum so much.

Katabasis feels like it was written like an academic paper. It presents a can’t-miss-it thesis, which the story feels compelled to reiterate after every important plot moment. Every decision in the present narrative is justified with supporting evidence in the form of a lengthy infodump or flashback. While this makes for an intellectual and thought-provoking book, it doesn’t really create a wholly entertaining narrative.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for providing a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Where to begin? At times I was confused what type of book I was reading: an academic paper, literary fiction, a dark fairytale, a Stephen King-esque horror novel—bone creatures, anyone? Unfortunately, it was often like Michael Scott’s Tube City: chaos and nonsense. Yes, I loved the magic system of the pentagrams and thought it was a cool study for Alice to undertake. To be candid, the ending was pretty solid, but it took wayyyyyyy too much time and effort to get there. I truly suffered through pages of dialogue that meant nothing, and I met a bunch of characters who literally did not matter at all. Kuang had me on an adventure and then she lost me. This could have been edited down to 350 pages IMO. The payoff was simply not worth it.

“Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest. Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd—this was proof you had something real to be proud of.”

Over the years I’ve ignored a lot of the criticism flung RF Kuang’s way about how much she shows off her education and how willfully know-it-all her writing style can get, because of two reasons: one, society hates little more than a woman confident in her intellect, and two, her books have always had excellent plot and characters in addition to whatever academic segues she chooses to interject. I can’t say the latter about ‘Katabasis’, unfortunately; it’s a journey through hell held at arm’s length, a story about romance that feels very little. I’m absolutely the target audience for this book – my masters was on Dante’s Inferno – and I was so very excited to read Kuang’s version of hell. It’s so lifeless, so much like a set piece for a middle-school play that I can hardly really say much about it. The two main characters, Alice and Peter, have a lot of history between them but no real heat; we’re told that they’re a little obsessed with each other and it is very difficult to say why. Katabasis is overlong and underbaked for what it is, and what it’s trying to say about the cutthroat world of academia. Not a bit of it was fun. My disappointment is immeasurable.

R.F. Kuang is a master of her craft, as far as I’m concerned. She’s proven that she has an impressive writing range and Katabasis is a lovely addition to her œuvre. It’s a dense book, if you’ve never studied logic and paradoxes (me), prepare to be confused! She does an admirable job explaining the intricacies of the concepts. Katabasis is chock full of academic references, and honestly I’m just impressed that so many of them are from real sources! We know for sure that she’s done her reading.
The image of Hell that she builds is truly unique. It’s also detailed and as we descend/ascend/advance through the pizza anus we feel as drained as our characters. There’s a compelling narrative that keeps you entertained and wondering how it will all play out in the end. There’s also a delightful cast of characters and you come to really care for most of them, and I found that most characters get the ending you think they deserve, which is satisfying to me. Finally, I loved the depiction of King Yama/Hades/whichever name you prefer! I wish he was around for more than the last chapter.
That being said, the pacing did not quite work for me. It was inconsistent and made it difficult to stay engaged all the time. I also didn’t find the romance to be particularly compelling or convincing, but I am a sucker for a happy ending so I’m not taking stars off for either of those things.

For a 500 page book on academia, this wasn't nearly as dense as expected. Maybe I benefited from a one-off course that discussed logic, that made understanding the magic system easier, and one of my takeaways of the book was skimming an old textbook. Still, there's "academia" books that merely use it as a setting, verses Katabasis, which interrogates the Oxbridge system, the flaws, the allure. The world-building is solid, but I can understand if the ending gets mixed reactions.



If I were to put this book on a display, it would be with Alex Stern series, Blood over Bright Haven, Dante's Inferno, Alice and Wonderland, and books on logic and paradoxes.

I'm officially DNF'ing this....for now. I am genuinely bummed about it because I read Babel earlier this year and it's become one of my favorite books of all time. Katabasis was missing the mark for me, entirely. The premise is fantastic but the follow-through fell flat. It often felt like Kuang was shoving her academic prowess in the reader's face, except the academics are made up and the explanations confusing.

I did love the part about Alice and Peter running into the ghosts of the undergrads who refuse to move on, because what if they're not reborn as magicians?

I love R.F. Kuang, and I really enjoyed many parts of Katabasis, but just wasn't a 5-star read for me. I think the romance element isn't fleshed out enough to make it believable in the end. And certain things never get answered, like why did Peter make that joke about her sleeping with the professor to a visiting professor? He never explained that. And I think too much time was spent going back to show us things and things not getting resolved in the present between them, then they leave happily together in love.

Sometimes there are books you start reading with an expectation of what you think it will be, only for it to turn out to be so much more. Katabasis is that for me.

A book about hell–possibly every written description about it since the dawn of time, from mythology to religion, over philosophers smashed together in one magical, albeit surprisingly (is it really?) dark (under-)world–and in the middle of it Alice Law and Peter Murdoch. Alice is only one of the brilliant minds studying Magick at Cambridge, but Alice has a secret. In a bout of pure exhaustion and carelessness, she made a terrible mistake, resulting in her mentor, Grimes, being killed when they were in the middle of an incarnation. In need to bring him back, she wants to do the unthinkable: go down to hell herself and bring him back; how else is she supposed to submit her dissertation after all? When Peter, her colleague and nemesis, decides to join, she knows she's in for one hell of a ride (pun indeed).

In classic Rebecca fashion, Alice is both admirable and deeply unlikeable (at least at the beginning). She's flawed and, for all her genius, not good with people, to put it lightly. Peter is much the same at the start. Not one to sugarcoat his thoughts and quick to speak his mind, he and Alice have a hard time getting along. Distrust, misery, and the fear of the dangers looming around them, the two of them clash against each other more than once. Only slowly let they lower their walls and start to talk about all the human things, Alice likes to keep separate from her person. She's a scholar after all, so feelings are surely beneath her.

Between hunting monsters (and being hunted), they race against time to try to bring back their professor from the depths of hell itself. Love, hate, and everything in between are only some of the tests they didn't expect.

Apart from the protagonists themselves, Rebecca did a fabulous job building her world. One thing I keep loving about her work is that she trusts her readers to get it. She isn't one to chew everything up, to think her readers stupid. There is a lot of research (as her books tend to have), a lot of knowledge about mathematics, philosophy, and mythology, and one does need to be able to understand, to understand the world. She does explain a lot, but she manages to do it, so you don't feel stupid while reading it. Essentially, Rebecca manages to teach you about so much stuff while still talking about a fantastical world.

There are a lot of triggers for this book (as a book about hell itself should have), so be prepared for topics like sexism, abuse, depression, and chronic illness (to name a few) to hide under all that academic whit.

Overall, I was unable to put this down, and I am so, so deeply thankful to Avon and Harper Voyager for granting me the possibility to read one of my most anticipated reads of this year prior to publishing. I can't wait to see what else Rebecca will come up with in the future.

4.75⭐️ | Talented doesn’t even begin to describe R.F. Kuang’s writing. If that wasn’t proven with any of her previous works, Katabasis has completely knocked that title out of the park. Rebecca is able to write in this mesmerizing and eloquent way. In classic RFK fashion, she’s not afraid to show you what a well educated writer she is. This book was clearly so well researched and thought out that reading it feels like learning despite the book being fiction. It’s very lore and magic dense in the way that Babel was, but manages to feel less heavy and weighed down by the “smartness” of it. It’s pretentious, but not snobby. Despite all the information packed into this book, the pacing never stalled. Everything was so compulsively interesting, I was eating out of Rebecca’s hand this entire book.

Even more so than Babel, Katabasis was the very essence of what dark academia should be. Rebecca’s characters are cynical academic weapons. They’re geniuses and you can feel every bit of their rising instability as the book progresses. Their hunger, their obsessions, their drive—it all just flys off the page. You recognize all of their toxic thinking and self-gaslighting, but you spiral right there with them. It was such an incredible portrayal of the academy in a fictional and magical alternative. The magic system that is rooted in academia and logic just created this perfect all immersive dark academia read.

While this is Rebecca’s book with the most “romance” please be advised it is still very much so a SUBPLOT. This book highlighted so many of the broken systems in academia as well as following such strong character arcs that break down conquering ones own personal hell and reaching so much growth by the end.

Alice is willing to go to Hell and back to retrieve her Cambridge College advisor. It makes sense since it was her magic screw up that sent him there. She didn't count on Peter wanting to come nor would he have been her first choice but better not to go alone. Their relationship - both past and present will change with each level as secrets are reveled. This book is two fold. You have the race through the levels of the underworld looking for the Professor but you also have philosophical questions about the underworld where the Greek philosophers and Dante left off. As with Kuang's other tomes the story is laced with moral dilemmas, wrong turns through a maze, complex relationships and much to ponder over. Her fans as well as readers of dark academia tales like those by Lev Grossman and Naomi Novik will eat this up. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.