Libyrinth
As I was wrapping up the paperwork on the thesis novels for the term, I finally plucked from the shelves Libyrinth, written by one of my colleagues at Seton Hill's WPF program, under the name Pearl North. It's a YA Science Fiction novel cleverly set in a Fantasy-like post-apocalyptic setting.
Let me discuss this cleverness. I read a lot of anachronism-ridden Historical and Fantasy manuscripts, by authors who really can't bring themselves to accept the premise of the setting they chose. They want a "simple" medieval or ancient world, but they want all the conceptual stuff that comes after. They want books in illiterate worlds with no paper and no printing. They want gunpowder-age ships in a world with no cannon. They want potatoes in worlds without America, and the Roman alphabet in a world without Latin. They want all the psychological ideas that Freud invented in a world that couldn't possibly use them, and characters driven by adrenaline but ignorant of biochemistry.
North gets to have all that, and logically. Her world derives straight from this one. So while life is mostly primitive, they have copies of Huckleberry Finn. There are buildings with electricity. Our slang can logically be their slang.
And that means that her readers can have comfortable familiarity, in an unfamiliar setting. Very clever.
The fundamental conflict of the story is that there is a nation whose culture is bent on the idea that written books are made of "murdered words" and that oral tradition should be all. They intend to destroy the last known library (which is so vast that one can, literally, get lost in the stacks and never come out), but not before they convert key texts into song. Our protagonists hope to save the Libyrinth. It then gets complicated.
A main character has the unusual gift of being able to hear nearby writing. The books talk to her, recite themselves to her. Which brings me to the really endearing trick this author uses to trap its audience into further reading. The quotes are labeled in the back of the book, so if they pique the interest of the reader, the source can be found. In other words, this book about defending a library may send its readers back to the library.
So if you're looking to spur a young person's interest in reading...
In all fairness, it should be pointed out that this is a 5-grimace novel, and that it suffers from the current meme of having characters, especially POV characters, blink at every crucial moment. Ms North was young and inexperienced when she wrote this, and it should not be held against her.