I am early up the book but it still resonates. Apparently this is a dark academia book too. I don't know much about the genre but the protagonist Alice Law is a PhD student and I can relate to her much.
I liked how they treat Magic as some sort of academic discipline which is studied, have different schools and researched at a PhD level. One person described the magic system as "chewy" and it somehow makes sense to even an outsider to the genre like me. They cross check references, pit the canon text against each other and what not. Sometimes the paper is in a language they can't understand or it might simply be unavailable to look at. How much all this reminds me of my still unfinished quest to find the proof of Hall's Lemma.
A lot of works and maths refrences in the book are real. I must go on and read 'What the Tortoise Said to Achilles' for the book used an argument apparently in that text and it got me intrested. The book also mentions something about Ramanujan-Casimir effect, which sounds to make up but is apparently a real thing. Here is a better article about the effect, it sounds interesting but still I will be passing up for we are mathematics and the physical things don't concern us. That and a severe lack of prerequisites. Our protagonist Alice may not like me though, for after some discussion about the geometry of space for a couple of pages:
"Oh, stop it." As always, mathematics induced in Alice the urge to weep. "What's the point?"
But unlike Verne's All Around the Moon the geometry does matter here. It matters in Hell but not in space! Indeed, if geometry matters there, then 'To Hell with Love'.
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