Review:
The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: |
Scholastic Press |
Copyright: |
June 2023 |
ISBN: |
1-338-29064-9 |
Format: |
Kindle |
Pages: |
446 |
The Library of Broken Worlds is a young-adult far-future science
fantasy. So far as I can tell, it's stand-alone, although more on that
later in the review.
Freida is the adopted daughter of Nadi, the Head Librarian, and her
greatest wish is to become a librarian herself. When the book opens,
she's a teenager in highly competitive training. Freida is low-wetware,
without the advanced and expensive enhancements of many of the other
students competing for rare and prized librarian positions, which she
makes up for by being the most audacious. She doesn't need wetware to
commune with the library material gods. If one ventures deep into their
tunnels and consumes their crystals, direct physical communion is
possible.
The library tunnels are Freida's second home, in part because that's where
she was born. She was created by the Library, and specifically by Iemaja,
the youngest of the material gods. Precisely why is a mystery. To Nadi,
Freida is her daughter. To Quinn, Nadi's main political rival within the
library, Freida is a thing, a piece of the library, a secondary and
possibly rogue AI. A disruptive annoyance.
The Library of Broken Worlds is the sort of science fiction where
figuring out what is going on is an integral part of the reading
experience. It opens with a frame story of an unnamed girl (clearly
Freida) waking the god Nameren and identifying herself as designed for
deicide. She provokes Nameren's curiosity and offers an Arabian Nights
bargain: if he wants to hear her story, he has to refrain from killing her
for long enough for her to tell it. As one might expect, the main
narrative doesn't catch up to the frame story until the very end of the
book.
The Library is indeed some type of library that librarians can search for
knowledge that isn't available from more mundane sources, but Freida's
personal experience of it is almost wholly religious and oracular. The
library's material gods are identified as AIs, but good luck making sense
of the story through a science fiction frame, even with a healthy
allowance for sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable
from magic. The symbolism and tone is entirely fantasy, and late in the
book it becomes clear that whatever the material gods are, they're not
simple technological AIs in the vein of, say,
Banks's Ship Minds.
Also, the Library is not solely a repository of knowledge. It is the
keeper of an interstellar peace. The Library was founded after the Great
War, to prevent a recurrence. It functions as a sort of legal system and
grand tribunal in ways that are never fully explained.
As you might expect, that peace is based more on stability than fairness.
Five of the players in this far future of humanity are the Awilu, the most
advanced society and the first to leave Earth (or Tierra as it's called
here); the Mah m, who possess the material war god Nameren of the frame
story; the Lunars and Martians, who dominate the Sol system; and the
surviving Tierrans, residents of a polluted and struggling planet that is
ruthlessly exploited by the Lunars. The problem facing Freida and her
friends at the start of the book is a petition brought by a young Tierran
against Lunar exploitation of his homeland. His name is Joshua, and
Freida is more than half in love with him. Joshua's legal argument
involves interpretation of the freedom node of the treaty that ended the
Great War, a node that precedent says gives the Lunars the freedom to
exploit Tierra, but which Joshua claims has a still-valid originalist
meaning granting Tierrans freedom from exploitation.
There is, in short, a
lot going on in this book, and "never fully
explained" is something of a theme. Freida is telling a story to Nameren
and only explains things Nameren may not already know. The reader has to
puzzle out the rest from the occasional hint. This is made more difficult
by the tendency of the material gods to communicate only in visions or
guided hallucinations, full of symbolism that the characters only partly
explain to the reader.
Nonetheless, this did mostly work, at least for me. I started this book
very confused, but by about the midpoint it felt like the background was
coming together. I'm still not sure I understand the aurochs, baobab, and
cicada symbolism that's so central to the framing story, but it's the
pleasant sort of stretchy confusion that gives my brain a good workout. I
wish Johnson had explained a few more things plainly, particularly near
the end of the book, but my remaining level of confusion was within my
tolerances.
Unfortunately, the ending did not work for me. The first time I read it,
I had no idea what it meant. Lots of baffling, symbolic things happened
and then the book just stopped. After re-reading the last 10%, I think
all the pieces of an ending and a bit of an explanation are there, but
it's absurdly abbreviated. This is another book where the author appears
to have been finished with the story before I was.
This keeps happening to me, so this probably says something more about me
than it says about books, but I want books to have an ending. If the
characters have fought and suffered through the plot, I want them to have
some space to be happy and to see how their sacrifices play out, with more
detail than just a few vague promises. If much of the book has been
puzzling out the nature of the world, I would like some concrete
confirmation of at least some of my guesswork. And if you're going to end
the book on radical transformation, I want to see the results of that
transformation. Johnson does an excellent job showing how brutal the
peace of the powerful can be, and is willing to light more things on fire
over the course of this book than most authors would, but then doesn't
offer the reader much in the way of payoff.
For once, I wish this stand-alone turned out to be a series. I think an
additional book could be written in the aftermath of this ending, and I
would definitely read that novel. Johnson has me caring deeply about
these characters and fascinated by the world background, and I'd happily
spend another 450 pages finding out what happens next. But,
frustratingly, I think this ending was indeed intended to wrap up the
story.
I think this book may fall between a few stools. Science fiction readers
who want mysterious future worlds to be explained by the end of the book
are going to be frustrated by the amount of symbolism, allusion, and
poetic description. Literary fantasy readers, who have a higher tolerance
for that style, are going to wish for more focused and polished writing.
A lot of the story is firmly YA: trying and failing to fit in, developing
one's identity, coming into power, relationship drama, great betrayals and
regrets, overcoming trauma and abuse, and unraveling lies that adults tell
you. But this is definitely not a straight-forward YA plot or world
background. It demands a lot from the reader, and while I am confident
many teenage readers would rise to that challenge, it seems like an
awkward fit for the YA marketing category.
About 75% of the way in, I would have told you this book was great and you
should read it. The ending was a let-down and I'm still grumpy about it.
I still think it's worth your attention if you're in the mood for a
sink-or-swim type of reading experience. Just be warned that when the
ride ends, I felt unceremoniously dumped on the pavement.
Content warnings: Rape, torture, genocide.
Rating: 7 out of 10