Review

The Library of the Unwritten

/ Denise / 1 Comment

(And other novels from Hell’s Library) by A.J. Hackwith

Book covers of The Library of the Unwritten, The Archive of the Forgotten, and The God of Lost Words, next to a Halloween decoration of a stack of books with a skull on top and a bottle that says Love Potions next to it.

I love novels about books and reading, so The Library of the Unwritten grabbed my attention while I wandered through the bookstore.  When I read the subtitle “A novel from Hell’s Library,” my excitement grew, and when I read the back of the book, I was hooked.  The premise is there is a library, located in Hell, but not a part of Hell, filled with humanity’s unwritten books.  Every story started but never finished, each idea mulled but never realized, appears in the leather-bound books of the Library of the Unwritten.

Every library needs a librarian, of course, and the current librarian is a condemned soul named Claire, who died roughly thirty years prior and found herself an apprentice to the former Librarian.  After he disappeared, she took the mantel of Librarian, and with her assistant, a Muse named Brevity, Claire makes sure the Library remains safe from the demons surrounding it and perhaps more importantly, that the books remain asleep. 

For the unwritten desperately want their stories told.  Occasionally, a book will manifest as a character and try to make its way back to Earth and its author.  It’s the librarian’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen.  There are a few exceptions: the Damsel Wing is a fun addition. The damsels originated as ladies whose only purpose in their (unfinished) story was to serve as the hero’s prize. Fed up with their lack of characterization and opportunity to grow within their story, and with no desire to meet the hacks who tried to write them, the Librarians allow them to live outside their books in their own section of the Library. 

But overall, a character must return to its book.  As our story opens, a hero-type character made a break from the Library and is back among the living.  Claire, Brevity, and Leto, a fairly new demon, are on the hunt.  Unbeknownst to them, a fallen angel named Ramiel is on a mission from Heaven, also hunting for pages from a book. 

As much as I would love to go into detail about all these characters and their adventures, I want you to be able to experience it all for yourself.  This is a fantastic world and I love how Hackwith pulls it all together.  Claire & Co. travel to other realms, including Valhalla, that have their own wings of the Library.  All the way through, circumstances force them to examine who they are and who they want to become.  When Library of the Unwritten ended, I hated to say goodbye to those characters and that world.

Thankfully, there are two more books: The Archive of the Forgotten and The God of Lost Words.  I won’t say much about them, since I don’t want to spoil anything that happens in the first book.  Both are great stories and continue to expand the realms and the characters’ development. 

The Archive of the Forgotten has a lot of story lines dealing with the immediate fallout from the previous book.  It’s well done, but it has a thing that I struggle with a lot in stories – the separation of characters.  It makes sense – everyone needs growth and sometimes our traumas isolate us from those we care about and who care about us.  But it can be hard to watch (or read).  The God of the Lost, meanwhile, left me in tears by the end, which surprised me.  It was such a beautiful ode to reading, writing, and creating that I found myself overwhelmed and filled with love.

Hackwith’s conception of the afterlife is fascinating.  Parts of it reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, shows like Supernatural, and the movie Constantine.  But those are just some of the ingredients that bring it all together.  Hackwith creates a fascinating world with its own philosophies and theologies. As mention earlier, there are various realms reflecting other belief systems.  Even Christianity’s Heaven and Hell exist, with some changes.  Hell in this version is only for those who condemn themselves to it.  For only a second, I thought that wouldn’t be a terrible system, thinking of how few people would want to be in Hell.  Then I realized that such a concept would mean a Heaven filled with the narcissistic egoists who believe they are flawless and continually the victim, while those who struggled to do the right thing would hold themselves to an impossible standard and thus condemn themselves unjustly for eternity. 

But Heaven poses a dilemma I’ve noticed in a lot of modern stories.  If we include angels and demons, Heaven and Hell, in a story, there’s the problem of God.  It seems easy for us to accept the idea of Satan to be real and active in human affairs; devils walking among us would explain so much.  But a force of omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent good?  If such a god exists, why wouldn’t they help us?  If angels are around, why don’t they ever seem to be winning? Instead of Heaven being paradise, we seem better able to imagine it as, at best, a sterile neutrality, burdened with bureaucracy and an absent Deity. 

Sure, it makes sense that we can’t have such an all-powerful being around in our art, able to end all conflict in the blink of an eye – there isn’t much of a story there.  But when we look at earlier times, there didn’t seem to be a problem with imagining such divinity and still having the world be a fairly miserable place. 

Has our sense of justice and fairness changed? If we create God in our image, have we reached a point where we realize that such a thing could not exist and the world continue as it does?  Heaven as a bureaucracy – something started with reasons and order and processes for a defined purpose, but now just continuing via inertia, without the spark or soul to give it true life or meaning.  Perhaps, however, the right soul could make the needed changes. 

These were just some of the thoughts Library of the Unwritten and the rest of Hell’s Library’s novels inspired. At the end, it once again made me so incredibly grateful for all the authors out there, all the readers, and all the libraries and librarians, wherever they may be.  

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The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias

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Book cover of The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias

There are monsters all around us – and some are hiding within us.  So Mario discovers in The Devil Takes You Home as his life shatters like a glass tabletop around him.  He knew some of these monsters.  As someone with “too many syllables” in his last name, turned down for jobs he was perfectly well qualified for, he had always been intimately familiar with racism in the United States.  He and his wife, Melisa, struggled to make ends meet, but their four-year-old daughter Anita brought them plenty of joy.  Until the doctor uttered the word “leukemia.” Suddenly, their life became endless drives between their home and the hospital in Houston, desperate prayers for a cure, and listening to medical professionals boil down their daughter’s losing battle as a “fascinating case.”

Soon enough, the monsters of our failed system rear their heads.  [SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH STARTING HERE FOR THINGS THAT HAPPEN RIGHT IN THE BEGINNING AND ARE PART OF THE DUST JACKET SYNOPSIS.] Mario loses his job for spending too much time at his daughter’s side.  Insurance doesn’t cover nearly enough of the costs of care and once Mario’s job is gone, even that paltry help disappears (ironically, Mario worked for an insurance company).  Bills are piling up, the hospital calls more often to demand payment than to offer any solutions, and soon Anita is gone.  Only the collections calls remain.  Grief rips apart Mario’s marriage and just like that, he is alone, in debt, and unemployed.   

Upon losing his job, Mario decides to contact an old acquaintance and former co-worker.  Brian, a white meth-head, always had several side-gigs going, each of differing levels of illegality. In no time, Mario finds himself hiding behind a van in the dark of night with a gun, waiting for his target to appear.  Brian assured him this man deserved to die, but didn’t provide many details. And Mario found that he didn’t really care.  When he blows off the back of the head of the man, he discovers a monster of some kind made its home in this man.

Mario also finds there’s a monstrous side living in him as well.  He takes on additional hit jobs, making money and finding a way to channel his anger and grief.  But then Brian introduces him to Juanca, who proposes one final job with the promise of a big payday.  All they have to do is survive a near-impossible job knocking off a cartel’s money shipment.  Vaguely imagining a plan where the money will bring Melisa back, Mario agrees. 

The rest of the story follows the men’s journey to Mexico and back.  They encounter all sorts of awfulness – racists, cartel bosses, man-eating alligators, and violence of all kinds.  Meanwhile, each member of the crew contemplates their companions’ potential to double-cross, as well as their own. 

Overall, it’s a spell-binding book.  I’m not huge on slotting everything into a particular genre, which is good, because it would be hard to figure out where exactly to place this.  It’s located in the horror section and it definitely fits, but it’s also more than that.  Then I saw some interviews with Gabino Iglesias where he describes this work as “barrio noir.” It’s a mix of horror, crime, borderlands, languages, and more, with a dash of the supernatural thrown in.  (Just like in the last review, this is another book with a lot of non-English dialogue.)

The Devil Takes You Home sometimes evoked strains of Almanac of the Dead.  It emphasizes the artificiality and arbitrariness of national borders.  It does not shrink away from the destructive impact of centuries of racism in the United States.  And like Almanac of the Dead, The Devil Takes You Home refuses to allow us to hide from the awful violence so many endure. 

There’s also a level of the supernatural to the story, which was interesting but some of it felt extraneous.  Mario has visions from time to time, brief warnings or whole scenes that felt incredibly real but didn’t happen.  It plays into the feeling of vertigo the book creates, where you can’t quite seem to anchor yourself in its reality.  It’s also terrifying to see how people’s faith and belief in spiritual powers results in horrendous cruelty and torture.  (Including a scene of brutal child abuse.) All of that is really well done.  The stuff that didn’t work quite so well for me was the suggestion of actual non-human or not-quite-human monsters.  They don’t appear often, and it didn’t kill the vibe of the book by any means.  But they could have disappeared and not been missed.  There was plenty of horror in the human characters. 

Overall, this is a bleak, creepy, haunting tale and hard to put down. 

Find it here

A Girl is a Body of Water

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by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

“Promise me you will pass on the story of the first woman – in whatever form you wish.  It was given to me by women in captivity.  They lived an awful state of migration, my grandmothers.  Telling origin stories was their act of resistance.  I only added on a bit here and a bit there.  Stories are critical, Kirabo,”she added thoughtfully.  “The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.”

Stories and women are deeply entwined themes in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s A Girl is a Body of Water.  Throughout the novel, we follow Kirabo, who is a twelve-year-old girl at the beginning, as she comes of age during Idi Amin’s dictatorial regime in Uganda during the 1970s.  Kirabo is the storyteller of her family, but she is also desperately searching for her mother and her mother’s story. 

Kirabo lives with her grandparents and a slew of aunts, uncles, and cousins on her grandfather’s farm.  She has no idea who her mother is and her father, whom she calls by his first name, Tom, only periodically comes around to visit her before heading back to the city. Her grandfather is wealthy and well-respected landowner in their village. Kirabo’s family surrounds her with love.  Yet she longs to learn about her mother, about whom no one will speak. This doesn’t help her control what she calls her “second self,” a mischievous spirit that lives within her and periodically takes over her body, causing her to fly and roam without really remembering what happened. 

Kirabo sneaks off to visit Nsuuta, a blind woman who lives at the edge of town, anxious to rid herself of this curse.  It must be done in secret, for there is some kind of unspoken history between Nsuuta and Kirabo’s grandmother.  Kirabo doesn’t know what transpired between the two, but she knows her grandmother wouldn’t approve of Kirabo going to Nsuuta.  Though Kirabo hates to disappoint or betray her grandmother, she is desperate for answers. Nsuuta seems to be the only one willing to give them.

Nsuuta tells Kirabo that her second self is really a special gift, a remnant of what she calls the “original state” of women, before men shrank them and began to control them.  Kirabo has a gift, not a curse, and she should hold on to it and treasure it. But Kirabo has other plans for her future.

Throughout the story, we meet all sorts and experience a wide range of experiences with Kirabo as she learns to navigate what it means to be a woman.  She learns about mwenkanonkano, a Uganda-rooted feminism while trying to watch out for kweluma. Nsuuta explained kweluma as:

            “when oppressed people turn on each other or on themselves and bite.  It is a form of relief.  If you cannot bite your oppressor, you bite yourself.”

Oppression is not limited to sex and gender.  At one point, the story jumps back in time to Nsuuta and Kirabo’s grandmother’s childhood and young adulthood.  They navigated similar issues as Kirabo, but with British colonialism in the background, chipping away at Uganda’s “original self.”

Makumbi’s writing is beautiful.  There were so many passages where a particular paragraph or sentence jumped out at me.  I should also mention that there are a number of phrases and sentences written in Luganda without translation.  By and large, you can figure out what’s going on from context clues, or if you have a phone/computer handy, you can look it up.  I personally enjoy having non-English language bits reflecting the author’s background or the setting of the book, but I know that’s sometimes frustrating.  I also discovered, once I finished the book, that there’s a cast of characters at the end, which might have been helpful in a few places. 

A Girl is a Body of Water also gave some insights into Ugandan history, about which I know very little.  At one point, Kirabo’s aunt complains about Amin’s dictates on how women dress.  Later, Kirabo lives through the uprising that ousts the dictator.  Some of the parts about colonization makes you realize just how bizarre things are that we Westerners take for granted.  There’s a great segment about time and the ridiculousness of starting the day in the middle of the night, rather than at sunrise, or gauging months and seasons by an arbitrary calendar, rather than following the natural world.  At the same time, Kirabo and her boyfriend also get into debates about whether certain traditions regarding women’s sexuality should be extolled for increasing women’s pleasure or thrown out as a form of genital mutilation.  

Overall, I really enjoyed A Girl is a Body of Water.  The only thing that clanged for me was Kirabo’s dilemma with her second self. I thought it would take up the entire novel and I was kind of surprised by its resolution.  The overarching themes of the importance of story, of understanding others, and trying to understand ourselves, wrapped in beautiful language and touches of humor, however, make this an outstanding book. 

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Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

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Book cover of Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher with a skeleton dog next to it.

If I had to sum up why I like Kingfisher and her books so much, it’s because she creates characters that I desperately want to know and be friends with in real life. And not just her human characters. All of the animals she brings to life are just perfect.  In her latest novel, Nettle & Bone, that includes a dog made only of bones and brought to life by magic, but who’s still just as dog as a dog can be.  (Oh, and there’s a demon-possessed chicken.)

As you might have guessed from that, Nettle & Bone is a fantasy story. Or to be more specific, a dark fairy tale.  Marra is a princess, sent to live in a convent as a backup should her sisters fail in their strategic marriages.  Her family rules a small but vital kingdom with an important port that neighboring kingdoms have long eyed.  To provide some protection, Marra’s eldest sister wed the prince of the northern kingdom.  Sadly, she died under mysterious circumstances.  The second daughter then replaced her sister as the prince’s wife.  She successfully gives birth, but to a daughter.  When Marra arrives in the castle for her niece’s christening, she makes a disturbing discovery.  Upon return to the convent, Marra realizes that she is the only person who can save her sister, and possibly her kingdom.

But she doesn’t know where to begin. “If we were men…” she thinks to herself.  However, as the powerless echo time and again:

            They were not and the history of the world was written in women’s wombs and women’s blood and she would never be allowed to change it.

            Rage shivered through her, a rage that seemed like it could topple the halls of heaven, then vanished under the knowledge of her own helplessness.  Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.

As she is unable to transform into a dragon, it seems hopeless.  But then she realizes she could enlist the help of a dust-wife.  Dust-wives were women who lived by graveyards and worked with the dead, along with doing other general witchy things.  A dust-wife could give her the power to kill the prince.  Of course, it’s never as simple as just asking for help.  Marra must prove herself and on the way, she collects friends and allies, ready to challenge Prince Charming. 

Kingfisher creates amazing worlds and this one is no different.  The magic is fun and I love what she does with the idea of the fairy godmother.  The other two books of hers that I’ve read, The Hollow Places and The Twisted Ones, are more horror-ific (I’ll probably never forget her descriptions of the horrors of the Hollow Places), but even in those, her humor and her protagonists make you think you could handle it if they stay with you.  I’m thrilled to add Marra and her companions to that group. 

(CW: domestic abuse, miscarriage)

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Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi

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Book Bitter Orange Tree a tiled table

Bitter Orange Tree is an interesting book to review.  There isn’t a standard plot, per se.  The synopsis version is that it’s the tale of a young Omani woman, Zuhour, who leaves Oman to attend university in Great Britain.  As she adapts to life in England, she also replays her memories of Bint Aamir, the woman who had been like a grandmother to Zuhour.  Time proves to be fluid, as the book ebbs and flows between the present with Zuhour and the past with Bint Aamir.  Though only told through Zuhour’s memories, we get a fuller story of Bint Aamir’s life, from World War I until her death, which occurred as Zuhour left for her education.

Yet while Alharthi shows how time is fluid, she also emphasizes its immutability.  Our triumphs and failures, our joys and our regrets, are here to stay.  Zuhour is painfully aware of this, as she endures the memories of Bint Aamir begging her not to go.  But she recalls the words of a poet: All your tears, all your pleas, will erase not a line of that which is written. There is nothing for her to do except remember.  Throughout the story, characters wrestle with the question of what do we owe our families versus what we owe ourselves.  Is it our duty to stay at home for as long as our elders need us?  Should parents be encouraging their grown children to strike out on their own or hold them tight, pleading “don’t go”?

Multiple characters struggle with those conflicting desires. One of Zuhour’s friends at University, a young woman from a wealthy Pakistani family, struggles with whether to tell her family of her temporary marriage to a man from a poor rural village. A neighbor of Bint Aamir wanders the streets, crying for her missing son. He had simply moved from Oman to the United States. And Bint Aamir’s final words and final moments continue to haunt Zuhour.

The thing which drew me to this book, and kept me reading page after page, was the absolutely gorgeous writing.  It is a testament to both Jokha Alharthi and the translator Marilyn Booth, and it’s no surprise that language plays such a significant role.  As Zuhour tries to navigate her way through the social dictates of her new life, she finds herself occasionally letting information slip out that she would have rather kept to herself.  After one such instance, she wonders:


               Why don’t words come automatically with threads that we can yank to pull them back inside ourselves? But there are no threads attached.  Those words had been said.  What’s done is done.

It is a question I’m sure nearly everyone has asked in some form or another as they internally curse their tongue for moving faster than their brain.  Later on, she muses about the “trap of language,” writing:

            At the time, was I even aware of such a thing as the trap of language?  I don’t recall.  Did I really say something to him about feeling disabled because of language.  I don’t think so.  If I Had said anything like that, he would not have noticed it anyway.  He would not have detected this trap.  He didn’t see me as disabled, bound to a wheelchair that was language’s incapacity to fully express me.  No, no.  We didn’t have any discussions about traps of any kind.

Bitter Orange Tree ends with a few lines of poetry and then lets you flow away.  But the rhythm and beauty of the language stays with you even as the cover closes. 

Find it here.