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”Your actions will define you.”

I love stumbling across really good fantasy that nobody’s heard of. I’ve sort of fallen out of the fantasy genre as a whole in the last few years, mostly because it felt like everytime I dipped a toe in it just felt like more of the same. And that’s fine! Everyone loves comfort reads! But when I read something new, I want it to feel new. I’d honestly never heard of this author before randomly adding this to my to-read list earlier this year, but holy cow does he have a ton of books out! This definitely was new to me, it was different, and it was delightful.

A note for my friends, whom I know love fantasy dearly: this is definitely grimdark fantasy. It’s very dark, very descriptive, and not exactly fluffy. There’s a lot of blood, a lot of description of gore and dismemberment, but all of it has a place in the story and didn’t feel gratuitous. Just know that before giving this a look based on my review.

The book follows a man who wakes up, claws his way out of a dirt grave, with no memory of how he got there. Around his resting place are the corpses of animals and people, but he certainly didn’t put them there. Who is he? How did he get there? Where does he go from here? Instinct guides him for the next period of time, until he finds himself drawn to a man in a cabin who inexplicably looks just like him. Before he has time to think, he reacts, kills the man with his own face, and is compelled to dig out his heart. But instead of a heart he finds…a black shard of stone. Touching the stone pulls it inside our main character, and restores a small portion of his memories in the process. Thus our man, Khraen, starts walking the path to restore his own black stone heart, piece by piece, and discovering along the way how bad of an idea it might be.

I loved the detailed worldbuilding going on here, and the philosophical ponderings about what makes a man and how memories can shape someone. Khraen meets few people on his path to restore his own heart, but each one has a reason for being there, a place in Khraen’s story, and I really felt compelled to continue to find out who Khraen was and where the story was going. The best part about the book for me was how, even with all the terrible things Khraen finds himself doing in pursuit of his goal, the author manages to make him sympathetic at the same time and includes moral dilemmas along the way. I thought that was a neat touch.

There’s even a bit of romance, but…maybe not in the traditional sense.

This was a delightful find, and I can’t wait to read the second book.

I really ought to stop reading general fiction, even if the book is about a librarian/books. I generally come out the other end vaguely disappointed and bored, and then I have to figure out if it’s a “me” thing, or a “book” thing. It could honestly go either way with this one, so I’ve given it my 3-star “it’s a perfectly adequate book” treatment, with a huge librarian-centric caveat at the end.

To summarize, Sloane Parker, librarian, meets cantankerous old Arthur McLachlan, ex-literature professor and history buff while shelving books at her library. After taking pot shots at her Pollyanna attitude towards life and her reading list, Arthur leaves, and Sloane finds out that the rest of the library staff live in perpetual fear of this guy coming in (every day, like clockwork) because of how awful he makes them feel. Sloane being, well, idealistic and librarian-y, decides to work at befriending him. The two become, maybe not friends immediately, but chummy adversaries who exchange barbs everytime they meet. Except for when Arthur suddenly doesn’t show up one day and Sloane gets worried. Then again the next day, no Arthur. Sloane gets incredibly worried, her boss tries to talk her down, but instead she…accesses his patron records without cause to do so(!), writes down his home address(!!), and cons her fiancée into driving her there so she can spy on the guy to make sure he’s okay(!!!). She finds out he’s medically not okay, but it’s through this intervention that she becomes his de facto caregiver because she doesn’t want to leave this poor old man alone, and a good thing too because she lost her library job after defying her boss and using his personal information without cause and needs something to do. The rest of the book revolves around Sloane, Arthur, and an impromptu book club that springs up around them, including a nosey neighbor, an estranged relative, a driftless friend who can’t decide what he wants in life, and a enemy/former friend. Each book club member has their own viewpoint in the book, and we learn about their struggles and problems in life, and how the book club comes to mean so much to them.

It's a heartwarming book in places, but ultimately I found each member’s book club story a bit boring. They each come to the book club with baggage of a sort, and we follow them as the book club members help each other to a conclusion of sorts. Some of the viewpoints/stories are better/more believable than others, and none of them are all that deep or complex. I wasn’t satisfied with how the book ends either; we resolve each person’s conflict (sort of), and then the book ends without a proper wrap-up…we just stop having sentences. It’s a perfectly adequate book for, say, an easy book club read or someone looking for some easy to digest general fiction, but I was left disappointed and kind of impatient for my audiobook copy to finish in the end.

And now a bit for the librarians out there who were just as horrified by Sloane’s actions as I was. Sloane accosts this old man in her own library, encourages his rude behavior by responding in kind, and doesn’t ban a patron who verbally sends employees into tears whenever he shows up. Then, she looks up his own personal address information and goes to spy on him (admittedly with good intentions) for good measure! I’d be horrified and mortified if an employee of mine did that to a patron. Just….no. Didn’t like the librarian inclusions at all. Don’t stalk your patrons, guys.

This one just isn't doing it for me.

Eh, a bit shallow from what I normally read. It's a feel good book, and just....fine.

I fully admit I read this to keep up with my Goodreads goal for the year. It's also been on my to-read list ever since I finished Circe and Song of Achilles, so it wasn't entirely picked for ulterior reasons. I'm actually glad I gave this a chance, it was very short but also very engaging.

It takes the name from the ivory statue Pygmalion created in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It's like a perspective-flipped Pygmalion, which is acknowledged by the author in the afterword and in other reviews here.

It was actually kind of a super creepy story that I expected to go a different way. I kept reading (for the half hour or so I spent with it) to find out where things were headed, and didn't even mind that it's a bit lacking in depth.

So, not only did it keep me and my arbitrary Goodreads goal afloat another week, I actually really enjoyed it. Definitely read either Circe or Song of Achilles first if you haven't yet, but this is a nice little bite-sized story after you're done with those.

I’m conflicted by this book. On one hand, it’s supremely good at showing what burnout in librarianship can look like, particularly in large cities. Libraries are being asked to shoulder an enormous burden that’s only getting larger, without getting the support it needs to do so. It’s no wonder that librarians everywhere are experiencing a great deal of burnout and disillusionment with the field they started in, and it’s unfair of other librarians to shame them for doing so. I thought a lot of points the author brings up about the unhoused and the constant struggle between helping them where they need it most and being unable to do so from a lack of funding, training, or general inability were great points. I remember this topic coming up oh-so-briefly during my own MLIS experience, and I think it gets glossed over entirely too much for up-and-coming graduates to get a real sense of the full picture.

On the other hand, though, as a book and a narrative carrying a cohesive thread, this book falls flat. The thought thread from one chapter rarely carried over into the next, and so I had a hard time figuring out where this book hangs out. It talks about the history of librarianship–is it a history book? It talks about the author’s personal experiences at Northwest One in DC–is it a memoir? It segues into the lack of support for the unhoused, drug abuse, violence within the community, and general crime within libraries–is it a social sciences thought piece? It meanders into the evils of social media, the lack of information literacy, the unaddressed racial issues everywhere–is it an op ed? I don’t know, and I can’t tell you either. There’s good points everywhere in this book, but I don’t think the author carried any one of them very far before hopping to the next. It gave the book kind of a disorganized feel. I also felt like the author, with her nine months spent in an actual library setting at Northwest One, maybe isn’t the best voice for speaking about how it is everywhere. She undoubtedly experienced more than any one of us can say, as I know I haven’t gotten PTSD from working at my library for six years, but I hate when people paint issues like these with broad strokes. It’s rarely accurate for anywhere outside of your own experience.

All that said, it’s clear the author cares deeply about these issues, and they’re real topics that need to be addressed for libraries to continue doing what they do for the public, for free. Resources are not infinite, and libraries need support from the community in order to keep their doors open.

Vote local, support your local libraries.

”The measure of your life lies within.”

Imagine you had a box whose contents would tell you almost exactly how long your life was. Imagine everyone did. Would you look? How would you react? Would you treat people with shorter lives differently? Would it change your outlook on life? This book explores those questions through the points of view of several people, who all come together, either directly or indirectly, through a support group for people with shorter lives ahead of them. We get to know the (large) cast, and essentially this book tells each of their stories through their own POV chapters and their experiences with this huge experience.

I loved all the things this book decided to explore. Personal things like love, loss, death, how to live your life knowing when the end is coming, and much larger things like how the world would react, societal divides, and political impacts. Getting to know the cast of characters as they navigate this weird world they’re in now is the point of the book, and if you go into this expecting some sort of action-y payoff you’re going to be disappointed. The characters are the point of this story, not the boxes themselves. I especially like how “interconnected” the characters feel, where someone referenced early on in the book comes to have their own POV chapters later on. It made the whole thing feel like “we’re in this together”, which I guess is also the point.

I see lots of low reviews about the inclusion of politics/agendas, the fact that it has sad moments, and that it’s a slow burn character piece. I guess, then, fair warning that all of this exists, but I think the point of the book is that it can all be overcome. There’s a lot of parallels here for living with a terminal disease, where you know your clock’s ticking, so what do you do? The boxes in the story don’t change when you die, it just lets you know ahead of time, if you choose to look. Sure there’s sad moments, but that’s life, and I appreciated how the book handled them.

5-star easy favorite this year. For the record, I don’t think I’d look in my box.