Review: The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson

[Russ Allbery]

The Library of Broken Worlds
by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Publisher: Scholastic Press
Copyright: June 2023
ISBN:      1-338-29064-9
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     446

The Library of Broken Worlds is a young-adult far-future science
fantasy. So far as I can tell, it's stand-alone, although more on that
later in the review.

Freida is the adopted daughter of Nadi, the Head Librarian, and her
greatest wish is to become a librarian herself. When the book opens,
she's a teenager in highly competitive training. Freida is low-wetware,
without the advanced and expensive enhancements of many of the other
students competing for rare and prized librarian positions, which she
makes up for by being the most audacious. She doesn't need wetware to
commune with the library material gods. If one ventures deep into their
tunnels and consumes their crystals, direct physical communion is
possible.

The library tunnels are Freida's second home, in part because that's
where she was born. She was created by the Library, and specifically by
Iemaja, the youngest of the material gods. Precisely why is a mystery.
To Nadi, Freida is her daughter. To Quinn, Nadi's main political rival
within the library, Freida is a thing, a piece of the library, a
secondary and possibly rogue AI. A disruptive annoyance.

The Library of Broken Worlds is the sort of science fiction where
figuring out what is going on is an integral part of the reading
experience. It opens with a frame story of an unnamed girl (clearly
Freida) waking the god Nameren and identifying herself as designed for
deicide. She provokes Nameren's curiosity and offers an Arabian Nights
bargain: if he wants to hear her story, he has to refrain from killing
her for long enough for her to tell it. As one might expect, the main
narrative doesn't catch up to the frame story until the very end of the
book.

The Library is indeed some type of library that librarians can search
for knowledge that isn't available from more mundane sources, but
Freida's personal experience of it is almost wholly religious and
oracular. The library's material gods are identified as AIs, but good
luck making sense of the story through a science fiction frame, even
with a healthy allowance for sufficiently advanced technology being
indistinguishable from magic. The symbolism and tone is entirely
fantasy, and late in the book it becomes clear that whatever the
material gods are, they're not simple technological AIs in the vein of,
say, Banks's Ship Minds.

Also, the Library is not solely a repository of knowledge. It is the
keeper of an interstellar peace. The Library was founded after the
Great War, to prevent a recurrence. It functions as a sort of legal
system and grand tribunal in ways that are never fully explained.

As you might expect, that peace is based more on stability than
fairness. Five of the players in this far future of humanity are the
Awilu, the most advanced society and the first to leave Earth (or
Tierra as it's called here); the Mahām, who possess the material war
god Nameren of the frame story; the Lunars and Martians, who dominate
the Sol system; and the surviving Tierrans, residents of a polluted and
struggling planet that is ruthlessly exploited by the Lunars. The
problem facing Freida and her friends at the start of the book is a
petition brought by a young Tierran against Lunar exploitation of his
homeland. His name is Joshua, and Freida is more than half in love with
him. Joshua's legal argument involves interpretation of the freedom
node of the treaty that ended the Great War, a node that precedent says
gives the Lunars the freedom to exploit Tierra, but which Joshua claims
has a still-valid originalist meaning granting Tierrans freedom from
exploitation.

There is, in short, a lot going on in this book, and "never fully
explained" is something of a theme. Freida is telling a story to
Nameren and only explains things Nameren may not already know. The
reader has to puzzle out the rest from the occasional hint. This is
made more difficult by the tendency of the material gods to communicate
only in visions or guided hallucinations, full of symbolism that the
characters only partly explain to the reader.

Nonetheless, this did mostly work, at least for me. I started this book
very confused, but by about the midpoint it felt like the background
was coming together. I'm still not sure I understand the aurochs,
baobab, and cicada symbolism that's so central to the framing story,
but it's the pleasant sort of stretchy confusion that gives my brain a
good workout. I wish Johnson had explained a few more things plainly,
particularly near the end of the book, but my remaining level of
confusion was within my tolerances.

Unfortunately, the ending did not work for me. The first time I read
it, I had no idea what it meant. Lots of baffling, symbolic things
happened and then the book just stopped. After re-reading the last 10%,
I think all the pieces of an ending and a bit of an explanation are
there, but it's absurdly abbreviated. This is another book where the
author appears to have been finished with the story before I was.

This keeps happening to me, so this probably says something more about
me than it says about books, but I want books to have an ending. If the
characters have fought and suffered through the plot, I want them to
have some space to be happy and to see how their sacrifices play out,
with more detail than just a few vague promises. If much of the book
has been puzzling out the nature of the world, I would like some
concrete confirmation of at least some of my guesswork. And if you're
going to end the book on radical transformation, I want to see the
results of that transformation. Johnson does an excellent job showing
how brutal the peace of the powerful can be, and is willing to light
more things on fire over the course of this book than most authors
would, but then doesn't offer the reader much in the way of payoff.

For once, I wish this stand-alone turned out to be a series. I think an
additional book could be written in the aftermath of this ending, and I
would definitely read that novel. Johnson has me caring deeply about
these characters and fascinated by the world background, and I'd
happily spend another 450 pages finding out what happens next. But,
frustratingly, I think this ending was indeed intended to wrap up the
story.

I think this book may fall between a few stools. Science fiction
readers who want mysterious future worlds to be explained by the end of
the book are going to be frustrated by the amount of symbolism,
allusion, and poetic description. Literary fantasy readers, who have a
higher tolerance for that style, are going to wish for more focused and
polished writing. A lot of the story is firmly YA: trying and failing
to fit in, developing one's identity, coming into power, relationship
drama, great betrayals and regrets, overcoming trauma and abuse, and
unraveling lies that adults tell you. But this is definitely not a
straight-forward YA plot or world background. It demands a lot from the
reader, and while I am confident many teenage readers would rise to
that challenge, it seems like an awkward fit for the YA marketing
category.

About 75% of the way in, I would have told you this book was great and
you should read it. The ending was a let-down and I'm still grumpy
about it. I still think it's worth your attention if you're in the mood
for a sink-or-swim type of reading experience. Just be warned that when
the ride ends, I felt unceremoniously dumped on the pavement.

Content warnings: Rape, torture, genocide.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2024-01-14

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-338-29064-9.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>