Wow.

A somewhat more elaborate review: You should be in the mood for this book before you read it, so you'll enjoy it fully. There's a strong current of conspiracy/hidden power/nature of humanity hoohah running through it, and there's at least one character whose story and development you become engrossed in, and it's very well written, in terms of exposition (its narrative timeline is what you might call "serpentine," but it works), pacing, dialogue and such. But what it really is is a highly enjoyable shoot-em-up, quippy one-liner, this-town's-not-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us, who do I root for? action story. If you want to read one of those that treats you like you have a vocabulary and a brain, I think you'll enjoy Lexicon.

The premise is that each of 200 or so human personality types are susceptible to certain primal words, different and effective to varying degrees for each type, which "unlock" their minds and make them malleable to suggestion, even subservience. We have a shadow group that finds promising young people to teach these words and how to do all that (and how to prevent it being done on them), making them "poets": agents of this shadow group, the overall stated purpose of which actually escapes me. (I don't think it's ever made clear. But it's OK!) One of our main characters is an exceptionally gifted "poet" prodigy who ends up at pretty drastic odds with the organization. And meanwhile, there is something called a "bareword," a word with power so primal as to make anyone who sees it more or less a slave for life to the next suggestion they get, regardless of personality, training, or anything else. These pop up every few hundred years or so, and sometimes trigger massive shifts in history (e.g., Babel). And hey, look, we've found one!

We follow the prodigy, a poet who considers himself responsible for her fall from grace, an "outlier" who is for some reason immune to the effects of the bareword, and assorted others -- and when I say "follow," I mean we wind our way through the narrative as it's structured, which is definitely not chronological -- as they fight for power, or survival, or love, or redemption, things like that. It's a page-turner without artificial cliffhangers -- it's a really good story, and you want to know what happens next, and how it ends.
Very satisfying, throughout.

I alluded to one of my minor issues with the novel above, i.e. there's onecharacter you really care about, and that's about it. Others range from somewhat implausible to downright one-dimensional. But the villains are easy to hate, and the dialogue among some of the implausible, one-dimensional characters is real snappy. You don't feel cheated by the lack of Multifaceted Characters Struggling to Make Important Decisions in the vein of "literary" fiction. The pieces fit the board perfectly.