This book didn’t have much in the way of plot. Tari goes
to university as an apprentice. She studies, she learns, she takes exams. Apart
from a bit at the end, this is basically the story
And that’s ok
I kept waiting for one of her fellow students to be
murdered and her having to hunt down the killer
Or another student to be a vicious competitor and she and
her friends would have to get together in a desperate struggle about them,
Or maybe the whole archive would secretly be run by soul stealing aliens
It wasn’t. It was Tari going to school. And that’s ok.
There were no love triangles, no desperate struggle, no
quest to save the world/find the deep dark secret. There wasn’t even a mean
teacher who was trying to make Tari fail for some reason that should have got
them fired from any decent educational facility
And that was ok
Tari has a secret but it’s only really a big thing
towards the end.
And that’s ok
No, really. I know I know, with any other book I would
have screamed at it to get on with some actual plot. I would be frustrated by
the lack of action, by a book where nothing seemed to be actually happening
But I wasn’t. I loved this book – really, the lack of
major epic plot was ok. More than ok. It was so excellent to see a character
just exist. No world defying consequences, no massive issues, no convoluted
drama o love triangles or convoluted dragging out of the plot with lots of
misunderstanding and caricature villains
This was Tari going to the archive to learn. That’s it
And it works because this world is awesome. This book is
one bug info dump – and yes THAT’S OK. It shouldn’t have been. By every rule
out there this book should have annoyed the hell out of me. But I read it all
in one afternoon, not stopping for a second (I was supposed to cook dinner. We
had take away. Which I ate one handed because I didn’t want to stop reading.)
It was one long info dump of a FASCINATING WORLD
I’m not going to go into too much detail about this world
because that is this book because this book is absolutely awesome and the world
building needs to be experienced. The book takes place in the After
(contrasting with The Before – or Earth). The After is a world created from
Earth’s fiction – every time a book is created, read and loved on Earth it
enters the vast Archive. And the characters in that book add to the After’s population.
Each new book can add new streets, new lands – even new cities and countries
and mountain ranges to The After. And the After is vastly diverse –whether a
city is sci-fi
