The Library at Mount Char
I tend to be a year or more behind the literature world. This is mostly because I prefer paperbacks to hardbacks, and you usually have to wait a year for those. I also get most of my books used (I go through so many that this is more economical), and that usually adds another year or two to the delay. This helps me avoid some of the hype and weed out the mediocre books with good marketing teams. If people are still talking about a book two or three years after its release, odds are good that it's worth reading. I'm generally pretty good at not getting my hopes up right when a book comes out, even if it sounds like something I'd enjoy.
Then again, sometimes I hear about a book and it sounds so perfect for me that I either rush out and buy it immediately or I spend an entire year itching to get my hands on it. And when a book is compared to American Gods (one of my favorites) as often as The Library at Mount Char was, I'm bound to obsess over it until I get my hands on it.
The danger, of course, is that it won't live up to my expectations. I did my best to temper them before I started reading this. The good news is that I didn't have to. This book was delightful. It's a fantastic mystery, filled with eldritch horrors and poor coping mechanisms.
This is a story about gods and, as such, the normal ethics don't apply. At least as far as I'm concerned. The great thing about mythology is that the gods (or demi-gods) can do some truly heinous things in the name of the greater good and I don't have any trouble rooting for them anyway. They're beyond human concerns, after all.
What makes this story great is that Carolyn isn't a god. She was just raised by one. Her motives are almost entirely selfish and her ends don't come close to justifying her means. But it's what she knows. She's been traumatized, and this is the only way she knows how to cope. I wanted her to win. And even when it looked like the world would have been better off if she had lost, I was still waiting for her to redeem herself.
I spent the first half of the book puzzling over what she was up to and the second half bouncing between horror and delight once the curtain was drawn back. It's been a long time since I've had so much fun with a book, especially a book as dark and questionable as this one. I can't wait to revisit it, knowing the ending (which, to be fair, I mostly guessed pretty early on) and see what I missed and what I should have picked up on.
Then again, sometimes I hear about a book and it sounds so perfect for me that I either rush out and buy it immediately or I spend an entire year itching to get my hands on it. And when a book is compared to American Gods (one of my favorites) as often as The Library at Mount Char was, I'm bound to obsess over it until I get my hands on it.
The danger, of course, is that it won't live up to my expectations. I did my best to temper them before I started reading this. The good news is that I didn't have to. This book was delightful. It's a fantastic mystery, filled with eldritch horrors and poor coping mechanisms.
This is a story about gods and, as such, the normal ethics don't apply. At least as far as I'm concerned. The great thing about mythology is that the gods (or demi-gods) can do some truly heinous things in the name of the greater good and I don't have any trouble rooting for them anyway. They're beyond human concerns, after all.
What makes this story great is that Carolyn isn't a god. She was just raised by one. Her motives are almost entirely selfish and her ends don't come close to justifying her means. But it's what she knows. She's been traumatized, and this is the only way she knows how to cope. I wanted her to win. And even when it looked like the world would have been better off if she had lost, I was still waiting for her to redeem herself.
I spent the first half of the book puzzling over what she was up to and the second half bouncing between horror and delight once the curtain was drawn back. It's been a long time since I've had so much fun with a book, especially a book as dark and questionable as this one. I can't wait to revisit it, knowing the ending (which, to be fair, I mostly guessed pretty early on) and see what I missed and what I should have picked up on.
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