The Library of the Dead

By -

 The Library of the Dead, by T. L. Huchu

When I first saw somebody post on this title, I wasn't sure I wanted to get into yet another 'supernatural library' type of book, even though I've enjoyed the ones I've read.   But it did sound interesting, and the public library had it...and I'm very glad I gave it a try.

In a future desolate Edinburgh, in which nothing seems to function any more, 14-year-old Ropa is the breadwinner for her little family.  She works as a ghostalker; when somebody has a haunting, she can communicate with the ghost and strike a deal.  She can also go into another dimension, the everyThere (there are many other dimensions).  Ropa doesn't do charity -- she needs every penny to pay the rent -- but a newly-dead mother won't stop bothering her to look for her little boy, who went missing just before she died.  

Ropa's decision to look into the boy's disappearance sets her on a dangerous road.  Children are going missing, and if they come back, they are vacant and prematurely old.  Ropa's friend Jomo sneaks her into the very restricted magicians' library, which is dangerous in its own way, but she also meets a new friend there and starts learning magic.  There's a new drug on the market, and the dealer is completely terrifying.

It's all very exciting and fun, and reminded me most of the excellent Lockwood and Co. series by Jonathan Stroud, which is for a younger audience.  Although this story stars a teenager, it's not a YA novel.  It's fantasy for any age (though also, it gets pretty vulgar at times), and I'd say 14+.

Like Huchu, Ropa is from a Zimbabwean family that has moved to Scotland.  'Ropa' is short for a much longer name.  But since I live in California, my brain decided it was Spanish (ropa means clothing) and I had a fairly difficult time remembering that she wasn't. 

 I particularly liked the detail that Ropa mentions once seeing Trainspotting and thinking it all looked like paradise.  Trainspotting is mostly about the squalor of poverty in Edinburgh -- but hey, they've got electricity and running water.

Huchu sets everything up for a series; there are plenty of unanswered questions (what happened in Scotland? where is Ropa's mom? why does everyone have to greet each other with 'God save the king'?) and Ropa is clearly just getting started.  The next installment in the series will be Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments.  I'm looking forward to that! 

Comments

  1. reeseJune 28, 2021 at 11:21 AM

    This does sound fun, but it's already quite popular at my library. It'll be months before I can even see it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanneJune 29, 2021 at 8:51 AM

    I guess I'm obligated to check this one out, since talking to the dead is necromancy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Joy Weese MollJuly 7, 2021 at 12:26 PM

    This sounds fascinating. I do manage to get myself sucked into lots of series if the word "library" is in the title.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more