Babel, or The Necessity of Violence

This book was fantastic! I love reading books that I know would have really impacted me when I was a teenager, and this definitely falls into that category, although it's not strictly YA. There are some familiar elements here, as the story centers around a group of youngsters shipped off to a school who become fast friends and learn and grow together. But this book is so novel and inventive and Kuang does such great things with that setup that one really must read it. The first thing that sets it apart is the system of magic, which is unlike anything I've ever read. The magic, which centers around translation, is a fascinating and thoughtful experiment that plays with both the concept of language and the extractive, exploitative nature of colonialism. Secondly, the aforementioned friend group begins in a happy little bubble of their environment, where nothing can go wrong and they spend some halcyon years just being together. Of course, this is pretty typical of the boarding school novel, and it's also expected that at some point the bubble will pop and the protagonists will have to contend with the real world. This book goes far beyond what I was expecting in introducing conflict, with Kuang not just popping their bubble but ripping apart their world. The conflicts towards the end of the book are both extreme, unlike anything I've ever read, and wholly logical evolutions of the world Kuang has created.

I'd readily recommend Babel to anyone, and I can't wait to talk with people about it; I think it will be very, very popular.