The Library of the Dead
4.0 Stars
9-20-2024

Bam! You've been Bardo'd!

Another entry in the sub-genre of YA books where magisterial wizards use their young charges to prosecute old grudges against other established wizards. This time the urban fantasy is set in a post-disaster Scotland, where the British Isles have been blighted by some (magical?) catastrope. The rest of the world isn't doing so hot either, but Britain has been particularly hard hit and things have regressed a great deal, and so it's Edinburgh by way of Lagos. And now we are edging up to the main feature of the book and the main reason I liked it, this book is completely packed with *stuff*. There's a whole post-cataclysm Edinburgh to learn about, with its shanty towns and mix of low tech and modern tech and magic, and urban foraging and gangs and districts and strata, and various Edinburgh landmarks that have been transformed along with the world. And there's post-cataclysm politics and political history, and of course there's magic, and magic-systems, and cosmology, and the politics between various mages and their various organizations and histories, and general Scottish history, and the MC's family and friends and their various relations, and then there's the cultures and peoples that have been stranded in Scotland as the world system collapsed, so that the primary characters are a mix of Zimbabwaen, Scottish, and Indian, and then there's all of their various accents and slang on display. I listened to this via audio book, and I think this is really how the story is meant to be enjoyed, and the author even nods to this as the MC talks about how she listens to pirated audio books as she walks around Edinburgh for her job. With the audio version you get to savor/struggle with the various accents and they have an immediacy to them that you would not get on the printed page. So while this is a YA book, in many ways it's one of the more complex and dense books I've listened to recently. In a few sentences you might get words from 5 different languages (I know I know, this is just English), Scottish slang or rhyming slang, one of a half-dozen different accents, and one of a half-dozen different types of world building. The one simple thing about the book is the primary plot; most narratively aware readers will get the basic outline of what is going on ~15% of the way through the book. Really though the book is all about the side quests, and the plotting is like the rest of the texture of the book, it darts in a half dozen different directions and escapades and really finds its richness in these alleyways of narrative and communication than in the main plot of the story.

Hmm, what else to say. The MC is 15 years old, and has led a busy life of public schooling, copper wire stealing, being part of a Fagan-esque underage-breaking-and-entering-ring, and most recently being a ghost-talker (an accredited but relatively low-status profession, of talking to the dead and delivering their messages to paying customers). The MC is quite poor, and is the bread-winner for her grandmother and little sister (both *great* characters, tons of warmth here), so money is a huge concern through out the novel. This novel isn't quite as proficient as The Name of the Wind in using money to outline the contours of their fantasy world, but money concerns do keep things moving along and gives you an idea of the various stakes and proportions at play. Oh, and I liked that the world is appropriately grim. The characters are warm and likeable, but the novel is true to its world and realistic about the events going on, and is perfectly content to say "oh yeah, because of events these X kids died horribly and these other Y people were crippled to greater or lesser degrees. Could have been worse!".

Ok, one final note, I liked the book's explanation of magic specialization, that mages were like Olympic atheletes. I.e. they excel in their field, but the mental muscles they develop for, say, marathon running aren't really the same ones they would need for shotput or for dressage. So while a mage might excel in one field (pyromancy, spirit-talking, or healing), it's very rare for a mage to excel in multiple fields to the extent that they would be comparable with an actual specialist in that field.