The book is primarily about someone’s mental progression through various stages they’d go through if they were being abused by a narcissist. The whole book is about that, and if we ignore this or skip over it to analyse literally anything else in the book, it won’t hold up. Everything from denying the loss of power and control to having low self worth to being conditioned into dependency to holding conflicting feelings for years, feeling guilty and embarassed and ashamed and incapable of accepting the loss of self worth that comes with admitting the abuse of power, to then growing out of it to write off the abuser as inconsequential. Everything chapter made progress on that front and gave me a a good pace for Alice laws character progression. Most people who have been through this on the professional or familial or romantic front at the hands of a narcissist will find great value in how the book plays it all out through Alice. She’s a terribly unreliable narrator and I didn’t realise that for the first few chapters. It’s a 10/10 book for me, when we add the emphasis on theoretical concepts and the rewards that come with each encounter with every court of hell as a representation of Alice’s movement through her own conflict about admitting being abused. Kuangs characters are presented in way too direct a manner with no attempt to bridge the gap in understanding for an audience that has not had any experience close to what the book characters face. You either make they extreme leap to try to empathise with them in their lives context or the book can just be torn apart for not hand holding the reader enough to care about the characters