I listened to the audiobook narrated by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulford-Brown.

Yellowface was the only other R.F. Kuang novel I’ve read, and I loved it. It was funny and fun, went places I didn’t expect, and had great characters. This novel was the exact opposite.

Kuang writes of racism in England in the 1800s in this historical fantasy novel where magic is real in the form of translation and silver working. Sound confusing? Wait until the multi-chapter explanation early on of how the whole system works, only to have it never be brought up again throughout the remainder of the novel. The important thing to know is that it requires two similar words from different languages, carved into silver bars, to work, and people who understand the languages have to be present when cast. That inevitably leads to people of color being used in the manifesting of these spells.

Professors at the Royal Institute of Translation take children from foreign countries under the guise of bettering their lives through education and better living conditions (which they totally do), but really want them for their translating skills. The whites don’t like the POC for anything more than their needed language, and the POC get tired of it and decide to rebel. Luckily, there’s a group called the Hermes Society that steals from the rich and gives to the poor to show the English their place in the world. Things escalate from there until the conclusion.

I’m being slightly sarcastic in my review, but the novel honestly doesn’t shed new light on race relations, and I didn’t feel it justified the actions of many of its characters. It’s overall well written, but the issues are within the content or lack thereof. There’s a long portion of the novel where nothing really happens, and because the characters aren’t interesting, it drags on. Throughout the novel, the author tries to teach me foreign words and gives us all little history lessons like she’s trying to justify to the readers what’s in the book (which are read out by a different narrator in the audiobook version), but these ideas should have been better integrated into the story. The ending was hilarious because the justification that the main characters used to back up their horrific actions was absurd to say the least.

I listened to the audiobook, which was good but wavered in quality at times, and I found it slightly jarring when they swapped out to a different character when pronouncing some non-English words.