The Library at Mount Char
written by Scott Hawkins
The Library at Mount Char is one of my favorite reads of the year. I heeded a recommendation from the booktuber cari can read and the many people who commented sharing her enthusiasm, and I was not disappointed.
Do not be fooled. The ‘Library’ on Mount Char is not one of those books about loving books. These librarians wish they could be that normal. Carolyn is one of the 12 librarians who report to the seemingly all-powerful and mysterious “Father” who adopted them all as young children and has overseen each of them learning a catalog. Father brutally enforces their education and forbids them from learning anything that isn’t their catalog, and these are not normal catalogs. Carolyn’s catalog may be the most normal; her catalog is language. But this doesn’t mean she organizes books on language. It means that she must know every language. Her siblings have increasingly strange catalogs of their own such as war, medicine, animals, possible futures, and death. They are experts, and life in the library is perilous and often horrific. We meet these librarians as they discover that Father is missing. And what follows is a maelstrom of mystery, tutus, and a power vacuum.
This book has the whimsy of Good Omens, the violence of Game of Thrones, and the daddy issues of The Umbrella Academy. I never anticipated what was coming next which kept me barreling ahead. In some books I’m driven ahead by the promise of a romance being fulfilled or a mystery solved. This book felt like an easter egg hunt on acid. How would it end? I didn’t care. I wanted to explore and pull all of the eggs from the damp grass. I wanted to open the next chapter to reveal the next suprise, and be left gobsmacked once more.
If you wish to enter the library with your easter basket, be sure to read up on the content warnings. This book has almost all of them. I personally didn’t feel too bothered by the content as I went, but that was likely because I acclimatized to the the horros within. When a new atrocity cropped up, I would think, “Yup. Might as well throw that in here too”. I can see how many people might despise this book, but to me it felt refreshing, like making silly faces to yourself after a serious work presentation. Letting the weird sh*t back in feels good.
Comments