This review was written by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tool_of_satan, who kindly offered to guest-blog as I got so swamped in schoolwork that I haven't had time to read either of the month's book selections yet. (I have four papers due on Monday, in Law and Ethics, Process, Personality, and Trauma, and have written only one of them - the shortest.) Thank you very much, tool_of_satan!
Libyrinth
is the first young-adult novel published by Pearl North, but she has written other fiction as Anne Harris (none of which I have read). It opens in the eponymous Libyrinth, which is a giant labyrinth filled with books. Which I have to admit is a winning combination. Labyrinth? Books? Sign me up.
Our initial viewpoint character is Haly, a sort of assistant librarian (sorry, "Libyrarian"). Like most of the inhabitants she was born and raised in the Libyrinth. Unlike most of them she is an orphan, her parents having vanished in the stacks when she was very young, and unlike any of them the books speak to her. No, really: if she's near a book she hears it narrating itself in her head, at least when the author finds it convenient (to be fair, there are only a few spots where she is inconsistent about this). All of the books she hears are English-language works we are all familiar with, except for a book written by the Libyrinth founder which provides useful information when the author feels like it.
Haly is in a bad mood because the Eradicants are making their annual visit. The Eradicants venerate the spoken word and regard printed words as dead and therefore evil. They haven't been able to conquer the Libyrinth, but they get to show up once a year to burn some books, chant, and get fed. During all this grim foofaraw we get introduced to Selene, the librarian Haly assists, and Clauda, a kitchen worker who is Haly's best friend. No points for deducing that the three of them will shortly be off on an adventure. And so it happens: within a few pages we find out that Selene has discovered the location of The Book of the Night (which contains the secret of how to make the tiny, near-inexhaustible power sources that run all the advanced machinery), Selene tells this to the head librarian, the head librarian sells this secret to the Eradicants to save his nephew (who runs a city they have conveniently just conquered), and our three protagonists ride out to get the book first and save civilization, or at least literature.
The early part of the book continues at this breakneck pace up until the three women find the book (in a sort of branch Libyrinth), discover it's written in an unknown language, then get attacked by Eradicants and separated. I think the pace is responsible for the problems some people have reported getting into the book. I had problems myself. Starting a book with plenty of action is fine, but it's necessary to get the reader interested in the situation and the characters at the same time. This requires maybe a bit more skill than the author has. A few pages to establish the characters in the normal life of of the Libyrinth, before the main plot really kicks in, might have sufficed.
In any case things calm down a bit once the characters are separated. Haly is captured by the Eradicants and hauled off to their citadel, where she is treated well once they realize that her ability to hear books means she is their prophesied Chosen One who willbring balance to the Force make the dead words live again. Exactly what that means is, as usual with prophecies, open to interpretation. Haly manages to convince some of the key figures that it's now OK to learn to read (conveniently, she has a book, confiscated from secret Eradicant readers). She also does some thinking about the difference between the Libyrarians, who spend all their time studying books and let few other people have any, and the Eradicants, who spend lots of time developing teaching songs to help the local peasantry.
Haly's sections are handled reasonably well (barring logical inconsistencies which I go into below). One could certainly argue that the Eradicants she talks to come around too easily, but based on my admittedly limited knowledge, it's actually fairly realistic; people seeing a miracle (i.e., Haly being able to tell them what a book in a locked box says) which their religion has prophesied are going to be in a state where they're vulnerable to epiphany conversions.
Meanwhile, Clauda and Selene escape and go to Selene's home Greek-flavored city-state, which is ruled by her mother. Selene's mother (who has chosen another woman as heir) schemes to gain power for herself, but Clauda manages to steal her magical ancient flying craft from its cave and show up at the climactic battle in front of the Libyrinth. The Eradicants (with Haly in tow) attack the Libyrinth and there is much shooting, but in the end Haly manages to achieve an entente; she convinces all the leading Eradicants they need to learn how to read, and the Libyrarians that they should help the people instead of sitting around the stacks all day. I am glossing over lots of detail here.
You may be wondering, since this was a book club selection for an LBGTQ month, where the LBGTQ content is. I was wondering the same thing for much of the book. The content is limited to one or two paragraphs in the middle: Clauda sees a naked girl and thinks about how nice it is that in the Libyrinth, no one cares that she is attracted to girls. That's it except for some hand-holding which is not necessarily meaningful. Well, and the soldiers in the city-state are all women and one can make certain assumptions, but we're not told or shown anything.
I am of two minds about the perfunctoriness of this. On the one hand, the book is not particularly about sex or relationships. There is nothing wrong with having an adventure novel where one of the viewpoint characters just happens to be a lesbian. Furthermore, she is young (15 or 16) and spends a lot of the book not feeling very well. On the other hand, the straight viewpoint character at least gets to kiss a boy. An attempt at equity would possibly have been better.
My major problem with the book was not this, but the fact that the background makes no sense. Which would be less of a problem if the background didn't drive some of the major plot elements.
Here's the background as we ultimately learn it. The book is set on an unnamed planet which was settled from Earth long ago by the Ancients. The Ancients had advanced technology (such as those tiny power sources) and built the Libyrinth and the branch Libyrinth, among other things. They were also a bunch of schmucks, as evidenced by the fact that they kept slaves. Eventually there was a slave revolt led by a pair of friends, Iscarion and Yammon. Iscarion was one of a group of slaves who taught themselves to read. After the revolt there was only one Ancient left alive, and Iscarion was assigned to extract information from her and write it down. He did so, and this is The Book of the Night. At this time he and Yammon had a falling-out. According to the followers of Yammon (the Eradicants), Iscarion got on his high horse and said that since Yammon's group hadn't bothered to learn how to read before the revolt, the others wouldn't teach them now, so there. Iscarion then took his followers and tried to build power sources using the Ancient knowledge, but failed, leaving a large glassy crater.
At some indeterminate time later, the Libyrinth was found. This cannot have been too long before the present as we are informed at the beginning of the book that the Eradicants arrived nearby about 200 years ago, and later on that the Eradicants' citadel is only a few days' travel from the Libyrinth. We are given next to no detail about how the Libyrinth was found, but obviously the guy who did so must have managed to learn 20th-century English somehow, and recruited people whom he taught and who set up residency. He wrote the book mentioned earlier.
So far this is maybe not the most plausible thing ever, but I can live with it. However. You may recall that The Book of the Night was written in an unknown language. Furthermore, Selene (an experienced researcher, albeit a young one), falls apart when she discovers this, despairing of ever being able to read it (she doesn't know about Haly's ability). This makes approximately no sense. If the librarians can learn 20th-century English, a language spoken by people light-years away thousands of years ago, they can certainly manage to figure out a language which obviously was spoken a short distance away a few hundred years ago.
While we're more or less on the subject, I can't think of a reason why the Ancients should fill their libraries with ancient (to them) Earth books. That appears to be all that's in there other than The Book of the Night and a galactic encyclopedia mentioned in a throwaway sentence. You'd think maybe they'd have filed a few technical manuals, with exactly the sort of information everyone is looking for?
It gets worse. Once Haly "reads" The Book of the Night she discovers that Iscarion was in fact unable to extract the secret of power source creation from the Ancient he questioned. So, what information was he using when he inadvertantly made the giant glassy crater?
And there's more! A leading Eradicant, having apparently forgotten that Eradicant tradition says that Iscarion blew himself up, tells Haly that he led his people to the Libyrinth. Near the end of the book Haly decides - on the basis of no new evidence - that this is correct. It's pretty clear that the author agrees with her. So maybe Iscarion didn't make that crater, which kinda solves the previous problem, but SOMEONE made it, and the Eradicants seemed pretty sure it was him earlier in the book. Unfortunately it just makes another problem worse: apparently Iscarion wrote a book in a language which he presumably spoke, then went off, found the Libyrinth, learned English, then changed his name and wrote another book either in English or some third language which everyone in the Libyrinth knows - and didn't leave any trace of that first language in the Libyrinth. If that was the language he spoke when he got there, one would think he would have left a Language X-English dictionary or something.
Furthermore, all the slaves presumably spoke the same language (we're certainly not told otherwise). So whatever language Iscarion spoke, Yammon and his followers spoke, and they presumably speak some descendant of it today. Since we're given absolutely no indication that the Libyrinth folks and the Eradicants speak different languages, they ALL speak this descendant, which makes Iscarion's unknown language even more ridiculous. (Obviously people can know more than one language, but we're talking here about a slave forbidden to read who secretly taught himself.)
And hey, how did The Book of the Night get in the branch library? This is a problem whether Iscarion is Libyrinth-dude or not. If he is, he could presumably figure out how to access the branch, but why file the book there instead of in the main library? And then why keep it a secret? If he isn't, how and why did he get in there and file it? Since it doesn't actually contain much useful information all this secrecy seems silly.
No doubt it seems as if I am spending a lot of time discussing fine points. And to some extent I am. However, all these points have major plot consequences and/or are major dramatic reveals. I can ignore inconsistencies in background details which don't affect the story much (up to a point), but these aren't that sort. Nor are they the only things North is inconsistent about. Near the end of the book we get a shocking revelation about Haly's birth which would be better if it weren't inconsistent with what we were told earlier.
On the plus side, the prose is decent if not exceptional, and after the early part North keeps things reasonably interesting. If she spends more time working out the logic of her plots she might produce something I can recommend unreservedly in the future. (There is a sequel to this, but I haven't read it.)
tool_of_satan, who kindly offered to guest-blog as I got so swamped in schoolwork that I haven't had time to read either of the month's book selections yet. (I have four papers due on Monday, in Law and Ethics, Process, Personality, and Trauma, and have written only one of them - the shortest.) Thank you very much, tool_of_satan!Libyrinth
is the first young-adult novel published by Pearl North, but she has written other fiction as Anne Harris (none of which I have read). It opens in the eponymous Libyrinth, which is a giant labyrinth filled with books. Which I have to admit is a winning combination. Labyrinth? Books? Sign me up.Our initial viewpoint character is Haly, a sort of assistant librarian (sorry, "Libyrarian"). Like most of the inhabitants she was born and raised in the Libyrinth. Unlike most of them she is an orphan, her parents having vanished in the stacks when she was very young, and unlike any of them the books speak to her. No, really: if she's near a book she hears it narrating itself in her head, at least when the author finds it convenient (to be fair, there are only a few spots where she is inconsistent about this). All of the books she hears are English-language works we are all familiar with, except for a book written by the Libyrinth founder which provides useful information when the author feels like it.
Haly is in a bad mood because the Eradicants are making their annual visit. The Eradicants venerate the spoken word and regard printed words as dead and therefore evil. They haven't been able to conquer the Libyrinth, but they get to show up once a year to burn some books, chant, and get fed. During all this grim foofaraw we get introduced to Selene, the librarian Haly assists, and Clauda, a kitchen worker who is Haly's best friend. No points for deducing that the three of them will shortly be off on an adventure. And so it happens: within a few pages we find out that Selene has discovered the location of The Book of the Night (which contains the secret of how to make the tiny, near-inexhaustible power sources that run all the advanced machinery), Selene tells this to the head librarian, the head librarian sells this secret to the Eradicants to save his nephew (who runs a city they have conveniently just conquered), and our three protagonists ride out to get the book first and save civilization, or at least literature.
The early part of the book continues at this breakneck pace up until the three women find the book (in a sort of branch Libyrinth), discover it's written in an unknown language, then get attacked by Eradicants and separated. I think the pace is responsible for the problems some people have reported getting into the book. I had problems myself. Starting a book with plenty of action is fine, but it's necessary to get the reader interested in the situation and the characters at the same time. This requires maybe a bit more skill than the author has. A few pages to establish the characters in the normal life of of the Libyrinth, before the main plot really kicks in, might have sufficed.
In any case things calm down a bit once the characters are separated. Haly is captured by the Eradicants and hauled off to their citadel, where she is treated well once they realize that her ability to hear books means she is their prophesied Chosen One who will
Haly's sections are handled reasonably well (barring logical inconsistencies which I go into below). One could certainly argue that the Eradicants she talks to come around too easily, but based on my admittedly limited knowledge, it's actually fairly realistic; people seeing a miracle (i.e., Haly being able to tell them what a book in a locked box says) which their religion has prophesied are going to be in a state where they're vulnerable to epiphany conversions.
Meanwhile, Clauda and Selene escape and go to Selene's home Greek-flavored city-state, which is ruled by her mother. Selene's mother (who has chosen another woman as heir) schemes to gain power for herself, but Clauda manages to steal her magical ancient flying craft from its cave and show up at the climactic battle in front of the Libyrinth. The Eradicants (with Haly in tow) attack the Libyrinth and there is much shooting, but in the end Haly manages to achieve an entente; she convinces all the leading Eradicants they need to learn how to read, and the Libyrarians that they should help the people instead of sitting around the stacks all day. I am glossing over lots of detail here.
You may be wondering, since this was a book club selection for an LBGTQ month, where the LBGTQ content is. I was wondering the same thing for much of the book. The content is limited to one or two paragraphs in the middle: Clauda sees a naked girl and thinks about how nice it is that in the Libyrinth, no one cares that she is attracted to girls. That's it except for some hand-holding which is not necessarily meaningful. Well, and the soldiers in the city-state are all women and one can make certain assumptions, but we're not told or shown anything.
I am of two minds about the perfunctoriness of this. On the one hand, the book is not particularly about sex or relationships. There is nothing wrong with having an adventure novel where one of the viewpoint characters just happens to be a lesbian. Furthermore, she is young (15 or 16) and spends a lot of the book not feeling very well. On the other hand, the straight viewpoint character at least gets to kiss a boy. An attempt at equity would possibly have been better.
My major problem with the book was not this, but the fact that the background makes no sense. Which would be less of a problem if the background didn't drive some of the major plot elements.
Here's the background as we ultimately learn it. The book is set on an unnamed planet which was settled from Earth long ago by the Ancients. The Ancients had advanced technology (such as those tiny power sources) and built the Libyrinth and the branch Libyrinth, among other things. They were also a bunch of schmucks, as evidenced by the fact that they kept slaves. Eventually there was a slave revolt led by a pair of friends, Iscarion and Yammon. Iscarion was one of a group of slaves who taught themselves to read. After the revolt there was only one Ancient left alive, and Iscarion was assigned to extract information from her and write it down. He did so, and this is The Book of the Night. At this time he and Yammon had a falling-out. According to the followers of Yammon (the Eradicants), Iscarion got on his high horse and said that since Yammon's group hadn't bothered to learn how to read before the revolt, the others wouldn't teach them now, so there. Iscarion then took his followers and tried to build power sources using the Ancient knowledge, but failed, leaving a large glassy crater.
At some indeterminate time later, the Libyrinth was found. This cannot have been too long before the present as we are informed at the beginning of the book that the Eradicants arrived nearby about 200 years ago, and later on that the Eradicants' citadel is only a few days' travel from the Libyrinth. We are given next to no detail about how the Libyrinth was found, but obviously the guy who did so must have managed to learn 20th-century English somehow, and recruited people whom he taught and who set up residency. He wrote the book mentioned earlier.
So far this is maybe not the most plausible thing ever, but I can live with it. However. You may recall that The Book of the Night was written in an unknown language. Furthermore, Selene (an experienced researcher, albeit a young one), falls apart when she discovers this, despairing of ever being able to read it (she doesn't know about Haly's ability). This makes approximately no sense. If the librarians can learn 20th-century English, a language spoken by people light-years away thousands of years ago, they can certainly manage to figure out a language which obviously was spoken a short distance away a few hundred years ago.
While we're more or less on the subject, I can't think of a reason why the Ancients should fill their libraries with ancient (to them) Earth books. That appears to be all that's in there other than The Book of the Night and a galactic encyclopedia mentioned in a throwaway sentence. You'd think maybe they'd have filed a few technical manuals, with exactly the sort of information everyone is looking for?
It gets worse. Once Haly "reads" The Book of the Night she discovers that Iscarion was in fact unable to extract the secret of power source creation from the Ancient he questioned. So, what information was he using when he inadvertantly made the giant glassy crater?
And there's more! A leading Eradicant, having apparently forgotten that Eradicant tradition says that Iscarion blew himself up, tells Haly that he led his people to the Libyrinth. Near the end of the book Haly decides - on the basis of no new evidence - that this is correct. It's pretty clear that the author agrees with her. So maybe Iscarion didn't make that crater, which kinda solves the previous problem, but SOMEONE made it, and the Eradicants seemed pretty sure it was him earlier in the book. Unfortunately it just makes another problem worse: apparently Iscarion wrote a book in a language which he presumably spoke, then went off, found the Libyrinth, learned English, then changed his name and wrote another book either in English or some third language which everyone in the Libyrinth knows - and didn't leave any trace of that first language in the Libyrinth. If that was the language he spoke when he got there, one would think he would have left a Language X-English dictionary or something.
Furthermore, all the slaves presumably spoke the same language (we're certainly not told otherwise). So whatever language Iscarion spoke, Yammon and his followers spoke, and they presumably speak some descendant of it today. Since we're given absolutely no indication that the Libyrinth folks and the Eradicants speak different languages, they ALL speak this descendant, which makes Iscarion's unknown language even more ridiculous. (Obviously people can know more than one language, but we're talking here about a slave forbidden to read who secretly taught himself.)
And hey, how did The Book of the Night get in the branch library? This is a problem whether Iscarion is Libyrinth-dude or not. If he is, he could presumably figure out how to access the branch, but why file the book there instead of in the main library? And then why keep it a secret? If he isn't, how and why did he get in there and file it? Since it doesn't actually contain much useful information all this secrecy seems silly.
No doubt it seems as if I am spending a lot of time discussing fine points. And to some extent I am. However, all these points have major plot consequences and/or are major dramatic reveals. I can ignore inconsistencies in background details which don't affect the story much (up to a point), but these aren't that sort. Nor are they the only things North is inconsistent about. Near the end of the book we get a shocking revelation about Haly's birth which would be better if it weren't inconsistent with what we were told earlier.
On the plus side, the prose is decent if not exceptional, and after the early part North keeps things reasonably interesting. If she spends more time working out the logic of her plots she might produce something I can recommend unreservedly in the future. (There is a sequel to this, but I haven't read it.)
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According to Wikipedia, the author won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for one of her adult novels, and another was shortlisted for a Sense of Gender Award. So she can do better with gender and sexual identity and related issues when she tries (or the people giving the awards were being odd, I suppose). She might have fallen into a "YA must be conventional" trap. (Or been pushed into it.)
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As for the bit of LGBT content, it makes no sense to me that, without more context, Clauda thinks about how great it is that same sex attraction is no big deal in the Libyrinth. Why would she think it is a problem in other societies? Is it frowned upon in the peasant Ayorite villages, and how much time did she spend them if so?
I mean, I'm lucky that it is easy to buy footwear, but given that it's never been an issue for me, I don't go around thinking how great it is that I can go buy sneakers whenever I want.
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Late!
Short: I felt to rushed to really give it a chance, but my seventh grader really liked it and wants the next. Any book that starts with the awesome superpower of hearing books has his vote.
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Re: Late!