Why Readers Are Divided on R.F. Kuang’s New Novel Katabasis — My Honest Take

I was scrolling social media the other day and saw a pile-on: people trashing R.F. Kuang’s latest book Katabasis. My friend told me about all the negative reviews she saw during coworking as well and I sat there thinking — did we read the same book? As someone who’s read The Poppy War trilogy, Babel, and Yellowface, I want to explain why this backlash to Katabasis doesn’t surprise me — and why it isn’t, on its face, a great critique.

My theory: the expectation problem

Here’s the heart of it: your first Kuang book will color everything you expect from her. If you discovered Kuang with:

• The Poppy War — you expect epic military fantasy, brutal action, and high-stakes war.
• Babel — you expect dense intellectual rigor, translation politics, and academic satire.
• Yellowface — you expect sharp contemporary satire skewering publishing and identity.

So when an author like Kuang does what she’s always done — reinvents herself — some readers read her latest Katabasis through the lens of their favorite book and complain: “This isn’t what I wanted.” But that complaint is different from a fair critique of the writing, plotting, or themes.

What Katabasis is actually about (my reading)

I read an early copy of Katabasis and it has been living rent-free in my head. The protagonist is a PhD candidate named Alice who is pulled into a literal and metaphorical descent. Her advisor dies in a gruesome accident, and rather than step away, Alice stubbornly drags herself (and later, another grad student—Peter, the golden boy) into a mythic underworld in order to get career validation, reputation, and closure.

If that sounds odd, that’s Kuang — she’s turned academic ambition into a Dante-esque hell. There are shades of Babel (obsessions with language and translation), echoes of Yellowface (petty rivalries and career anxieties), and the moral brutality you tasted in The Poppy War, but reconfigured into a dark-academia myth.

Why some readers call it “slow” — and why that’s sometimes the point

Kuang’s books are not fast-food reads. If you came for nonstop action or a snarky quick satire, the deliberate pacing and intellectual density can feel like a slog. But I’d argue that in this book, the slog is intentional: academia is slog. The repetition, bureaucracy and petty cruelty are part of the point — Kuang makes the reader feel the grind so we understand why a character might sell her soul for validation.

Characters: messy, unlikeable — by design

Alice is messy and morally compromised. Kuang doesn’t write comforting heroines; she writes characters who force you to look at the ugliest parts of ambition, envy, and survival. If you expect a neat protagonist you can cheerlead, Katabasis won’t be that book. If you want a book that makes you squirm, think, and sometimes laugh in bitterness — this one delivers.

How Katabasis connects to Kuang’s back catalog

• Poppy War: The moral ferocity and willingness to make readers complicit.
• Babel: The intellectual obsessions and translation/academic concerns.
• Yellowface: The petty, corrosive dynamics of success and reputation.

Kuang is building an archive of different modes — fantasy, academic history, satire — but the through-line is her appetite for showing systems and the human compromises they produce.

Final thoughts

So — is the backlash fair? Sometimes yes, when readers expect a re-run. But often no: Kuang is an author who challenges reader comfort. If you loved The Poppy War for blood and spectacle, come to this new book with fresh eyes. If you loved Babel for intellectual rigor, you’ll notice the shared DNA. Most importantly: read Kuang on her own terms.

Tell me — what was your first R.F. Kuang book? Did it shape how you read Katabasis? Drop your order and thoughts in the comments.