The Library Of Broken Worlds - Alaya Dawn Johnson
- Publisher – Magpie
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £9.99 paperback | £5.99 Kindle
I hadn't heard of this until it appeared on the shortlist for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize, and the synopsis sounded like something I'd really enjoy. Here's how that reads:
In the winding underground tunnels of the Library, the great celestial peacekeeper of the three systems, a terrible secret lies buried.
As the daughter of a Library god, Freida has spent her whole life exploring the Library's ever-changing tunnels and communing with the gods. Her unparalleled access makes her unique – and dangerous.
When Freida meets Joshua, a mortal boy desperate to save his people, and Nergüi, a Disciple from a persecuted religious minority, Freida is compelled to break ranks with the gods and help them. But in order to do so, she will have to venture deeper into the Library than she has ever known. There she will discover the atrocities of the past, the truth of her origins, and the impossibility of her future…
With the world at the brink of war, Freida embarks on a journey to fulfill her destiny, one that pits her against an ancient war god. Her mission is straightforward: Destroy the god before he can rain hellfire upon thousands of innocent lives – if he doesn't destroy her first.
Unfortunately this was a DNF for me, and I didn't make it particularly far into the novel. I've started it a few times over the past couple of weeks hoping that I'd finally see what everyone else seems to see in it, and each time I've made it a little further, but frankly the only reason I got further in it was because I was slightly more stubborn with each subsequent read and not because I suddenly found something in the text that I couldn't see before.
I found this book to be completely impenetrable. I never had any idea what anybody was talking about, who the characters were, what the world was meant to look like, what significance anything had. I couldn't glean any meaning from it at all. It's very rare that a book makes me feel stupid but reading this felt like sitting in a thick cloud of brain fog.
There's a very stubborn part of me that doesn't want to feel "defeated" by a book and wants to persevere with this out of sheer bloody-minded stubbornness, but I'm still in my era of aggressive abandonment and after forcing myself to finish Prophet Song and not really thinking it was worth it I finally threw in the towel on this one.
That makes two DNFs out of the five books on the Ursula K Le Guin Prize shortlist that I've read but that's par for the course really. Hopefully I'll get on better with the next book I pick up off that list.
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