Babel is a wanna-be intellectual’s dream and an actual intellectual’s nightmare. I fall into the former, so I loved it.

Set in England’s victorian days the reader follows Robin Swift, a translator student in Oxford, as he grapples with the realities of the world.

This story has layers. The author flexes her knowledge, education and experience to the reader through the complex storylines that should keep a reader on their toes. Yet, it fell flat a few times for me.

Starting off with the good, I like the fantasy angle. It gives the author an ‘out’ if any of those ‘educated people’ come for her (which goodness, there are a lot of them!). It also adds a bit of spice to the story and can appeal to a broader audience. The characters were developed wonderfully. Even if you don’t like them, I could see how any one reading this book would root for them. Overall – an excellent read, a journey and a little bit of learning would have made this a five star book.

The reason for the star deduction is simply the length and (as other reviewers pointed out) sometimes this story got a little too YA for my liking. I could see how the author was pointing out certain POINTS in the story ahead of time that we knew the characters would come back to make it full circle. These pointers were too obvious and on top of it, took too long to get back around to. I could see a good 100-200 pages chopped from this book without causing any disruptions to the overall plot. It was unnecessarily long and sometimes treated the reader like an idiot (note comment above where I mention the author wanted to ‘flex’).

So in the end, I might sit on this and start feeling disappointed. Let down. Lose memory of this world that Kuang worked so hard to build. Yet, the story itself had so much thought put into it, that I am baffled and in awe. Wonderful job Kuang. Hats off to you.