Chlorine's Reviews > Babel

This is an alternate history book set in the 19th century Oxford university. In this alternate world, words have power and translators can make something similar to magic by exploiting the differences between a word and its translation. The British empire uses the translators at Oxford to maintain and extend its power.
We follow a group of four young translator students, who are discriminated because they are not white and/or not males. They were brought to Oxford because their skills in languages from faraway places are needed for the translation institute, but they are made to feel like they don't really belong.
Little by little, they will start to question the whole system of dominations on which the British Empire was built.

I thought the magic system was really interesting and it was IMO the high point of this book. The daily discrimination and the fact that well-meaning people could be oblivious to it was also really interesting to me. However, the book was a bit spoilt for me by its last part, in which I thought the students were behaving in a completely unbelievable way.