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A girl named Esther, fleeing the town that hanged her girlfriend for possession of illegal books, stows away in the wagon of a visiting group of Librarians. In part she’s drawn to their work — distributing Approved Materials for reading so people all around this postapocalyptic version of America will know what to think — but mainly she wants to escape an arrange marriage and can’t think of another way. The Librarians aren’t thrilled to have a stowaway, still less considering that they’re on a risky mission. But they let Esther stay with them, for now. The longer she stays, the clearer it becomes that the things she thought she knew about the world were very, very wrong.
“Mousy, fearful girl finds her spine” is a genre of books I enjoy, as a spine-having fearful girl. Esther comes from a world that has told her over and over that there’s something wrong with her. She’s wrong, particularly, for being a girl who’s attracted to people that aren’t men; and the proof is that her girlfriend, and best friend, Beatriz, hanged for it. When she joins up with the Librarians, one of the first things she learns is that the Head Librarian, Bet, is queer too and in a longterm relationship with another Librarian, Leda. As she’s still recovering from that shock, she’s introduced to Cye, who’s nonbinary.1 There are more shocks ahead, including the realization that the Librarians are part of a bigger resistance to the status quo. But the biggest and best and most emotionally satisfying realization for Esther is that becoming more like the Librarians really means becoming more like herself — the self that she’s been hiding from and trying to repress, the self she’s been told was inherently a transgression.
Esther’s realization that she has been lied to vis-a-vis what the world is like and what sorts of being are available to her personally occupies a good chunk of the book. But that’s a plot mechanism that offers readers limited satisfaction, given that we — and most of the characters who aren’t Esther — know all along that it’s okay to be queer. Plus, part of Esther’s journey to this realization involves acknowledging her attraction to Cye, and this feels kind of heartless given that she just watched her last girlfriend get hanged. Like, that just happened. So not only does Esther move on very quickly, but the book is so interested in her relationship with Cye that it gives short shrift to her relationship with, and grief for, Beatriz. Which again makes it harder to invest as much in Esther’s self-actualization as a queer woman.
Overall, I think my problems with the book broadly lay in the worldbuilding. Gailey uses a lot of buzzy words like resistance and Approved Materials, which are clearly meant to evoke a dystopian and repressive world — and they do! But worldbuilding requires more than just evocation, and Gailey skimps on the additional details. What happened to the world to get it to this state? Who enforces the bans on non-approved materials? Like, does that happen at the local level, as it appears to have happened in Beatriz’s case? Because if so then I would expect a lot of regional variation, but the premise of the book seems to suggest that there’s a more top-down approach to Approved Materials, in which case, who on earth is at the top? I had no idea of the answers to any of these questions, which kept the book from feeling like it had real stakes.
All in all, a medium read for me! I’d have preferred it to have a little more bite, both on the personal level where we get to know Esther a little better as a person rather than a symbol of the world’s failings, and on the broader scale where we learned a bit more about the world itself.
Another note: I received this book as an ARC from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.
- Gailey does a nice job of avoiding pronouns for Cye in the narrative before Esther learns Cye’s pronouns. I liked it that Cye doesn’t get misgendered, even when the narrator doesn’t yet know how to correctly gender them. ↩