The Library of Broken Worlds is the third Young Adult novel by author Alaya Dawn Johnson, one of my favorite lesser known authors, despite the fact that every long fiction she's written has managed to earn awards. Her first YA novel, Love is the Drug, won the Nebula/Norton Award for best YA SF/F novel; her second novel The Summer Prince was nominated for that same award (and is one of my few perfect score books - it's incredible); and her third novel, Trouble the Saints, won the World Fantasy Award. ADJ's works have varied in their settings and characters, even as they often deal with similar themes of racial and other forms of oppression and injustice, and they have always featured strong characters and fascinating plots - as such she's basically an auto-read for me whenever I hear that she's published anything new.
And The Library of Broken Worlds is perhaps the deepest novel ADJ has ever written as the novel is packed with ideas, themes, questions and concepts about tons of things - about love, about the long term trauma and need to heal from sexual abuse, about power, about legal precedents and how access and abuse of those precedents can solidify power, about the value of one people vs another, etc. etc. There's a ton here, all explored in a plot featuring AIs with strange morality and concepts, a world filled with techno-organic life all around the protagonist - a girl named Freida who was birthed seemingly by one of those AI gods for an unknown purpose and who tells most of the story in communication with a war god AI she is seemingly supposed to destroy. And this is a story told in a way heavily reliant upon description, metaphor, and internal tales, such that well it's not only easy to miss what's being explored, but I'm pretty sure I DID miss out on some of what Johnson was trying to get at.
In some ways that obtuse plot structure thus prevents this book from fully working - I suspect nearly every reader will come out of this confused by a good portion of what they read, and that feeling will definitely frustrate many readers. At the same time, the plot's examination of power, oppression, and historical wrongs, as well as its following of a coming of age story of love, of trying to figure out who one is, and of tremendous self-determination even in the face of trauma and abuse is extremely compelling and makes this a definite recommend.
More explanations after the jump:
TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual Abuse of a teenage character (in virtual reality) through one character acting without the other's consent. This isn't explicitly described, but it's very important to the plot, so it can't be ignored, but this plot element is treated extremely seriously and all of its ramifications explored. Also possibly triggering: Oppression of minority groups and dehumanization of peoples.
Plot Summary:
A girl, Freida, speaks to the war god Nameren. She is dying of a deadly virus, but she was also designed for deicide - to kill Nameren himself. And yet, she tells the Nameren she has no intention for deicide, and is there merely to wake him up by telling him her story....
Freida was found in the tunnels of the Library, the plane between worlds guarded by four sleeping gods whose knowledge, avatars, and biochemical creations make up the very grounds of the Library. Her existence is a matter of debate within the Library - is she a human or just a secondary AI of the gods - but the Head Librarian Nadi raises her as human, as if ze was her parent. Yet Freida soon finds her own existence threatened by other forces, as the major powers in the Galaxy are on the verge of war and violence, especially against the minorities whose cities they control, and Nadi finds zirself struggling to continue the Library's role as the keeper of Peace through an ancient Peace Treaty...and that struggle threatens to unleash forces who have less than favorable intentions towards Freida, especially in how Freida seems able to communicate with the gods in otherwise impossible ways.
But as Freida grows up, she finds herself connected to two others - Joshua from Tierra and Nergüi from Miuri - who are fighting to use the Treaty to protect their people from the oppressors who wish to destroy them for the sake of their own freedoms, in spite of seemingly impossible precedents. And in trying to help the two of them, Freida will discover that the truth of the Library is not what it seems...and that the truth of Freida herself is not what it seems, and may unleash a truth that will change everything - the galaxy, her friends, and herself.....Writing a plot summary for The Library of Broken Worlds is hard, because there's just so much going on that it's very very hard to give justice to everything that the book is trying to do. For example, the plot description above - and the plot description provided by the publisher - makes the book almost seem like a conspiracy thriller, in which the protagonists discover a dark past that people would fight to protect. And sure there's aspects of that plot structure here, such that the description isn't wrong, and yet it's very incomplete.
This is the story also of a girl who is growing up in a world where people deny that she has a basis for existing, who has to deal with growing attractions to two different people (She's Bi, not that sexuality is at all an issue in this very queer book where neopronouns are common and unremarkable), and who has to deal with things such as: 1) her parent keeping secrets from her to try to protect her; 2) sexual assault as a teen that she still carries trauma from even as she tries to deny it; 3) a world that seems more and more unjust as people in power keep trying to make her have to sacrifice some part of herself to get what she wants, as those same people keep trying to destroy others to get what they want. This is the story dealing with power and oppression through the use of supposed legal precedent and the twisting of the past history. And this is also a story about possibilities and quantum entanglement and the costs of giving up those possibilities for short term gain. And a lot more.
The book tells this story in a way that is hardly straightforward and in a way that does not attempt to hold the reader's hand at all. We jump right into this world with little explanation for how the world works, how the Library works, or how the galactic political situation works - the reader has to figure it out themselves. A major theme of the book is the power of stories and histories, and the book leaves it similarly to the reader how stories and metaphors - which the AIs tend to speak in - convey characters' messages and explain different concepts. It's a method of storytelling that leaves it very likely that the reader will miss some of what is happening in the book or what is being conveyed, and not always in a good way (like the Virus that infects Freida is something that happens in a blink and it's so easily missable that it just feels like it comes from nowhere despite the reader being told it's going to happen in the first few pages). I definitely missed a whole bunch of what happened in this book, for sure.
But it largely as a whole works in telling two different kinds of stories. First there are stories about general themes about power, justice, truth and love. We see that here as Joshua and Nergüi fight to find legal precedent in a treaty that the powerful conquerors have used to justify their people's oppression, only to find that the powerful will bend words and the world to their will no matter how much truth they uncover. We see that similarly in how blind some in power are to the wonders Freida and her friends can find, and to the costs and sacrifices they are making as they continue to deny that those they oppress are of equal value to themselves. It's really well done and fascinating, even as again I missed things. And then there's the stories about Freida growing up and coming into herself, learning about love through her parent's teachings - about Love being about Radical Trust, Radical Vulnerability, and Radical Truth - and through her own experiences, both good and past. In that story we deal with trauma, like Freida being unable to admit how she hasn't gotten past the trauma of her virtual sexual assault, as well as the trauma of her being forced to suffer for the simple crime of her own existence, and being forced to choose between her desires for security and what she knows is right. It's a coming of age story that is both young adult in character and adult in its context and it really works.
I'm kind of rambling and not saying much here, but its hard to really explain the Library of Broken Worlds. All I can say more is that this is a confusing and sometimes hard to figure out book, and yet it is indeed totally worth trying.
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