nevanna | Book Discussion

As quite a few people have already gathered, one of my favorite reads of 2012 was Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer. I’d really enjoyed Hines’ The Stepsister Scheme and its sequels (fairy-tale retellings in which a trio of princesses kick ass and take names – go read them!) and was excited to read his first urban fantasy outing, especially once I found out about the premise. Libriomancy is the ability to reach into a book and create objects both mundane and magical from its pages, which I am willing to wager most readers – especially of speculative fiction – have wanted to do at some point or another. When the story begins, our protagonist, Isaac Vainio, has been working as a small-town librarian after his reckless and disastrous use of libriomancy got him kicked out of a secret organization that regulates magical activity around the world. However, an unexpected attack on his library throws him back into action, and soon he and his dryad companion Lena (accompanied by a fire-spider named Smudge) are racing to stop a supernatural war and unravel the secrets of the magic that has shaped their lives.

I read this one back in September, and meant to write up my complete thoughts, but was diverted by schoolwork, and then by the holidays and a post-semester writing slump. This did not stop me from brandishing my copy at my friends and exclaiming, “This book is awesome! The characters are great! The magic system is great! The relationships are great! It’s funny and exciting and full of geeky references! Our heroes beat up a bunch of sparkly vampires in the first chapter!”

All of these things are true. And, to give a slight disclaimer, there are many ways - some obvious, some less so - in which this book was a deeply subjective experience for me. Nevertheless, here are some specific thoughts that I've managed to formulate after re-reading. I’ve tried to keep them free of crucial spoilers, beyond “here’s what’s going on with this character.”

~ Let’s get this out of the way, first: I adore Isaac. He’s clever, determined, quick-thinking, good-hearted but pragmatic, very believably flawed, and, as a bonus, a massive science fiction and fantasy geek. What distinguishes him as a character is the sheer joy that he finds in both books and magic, as well as his curiosity and thirst for knowledge. He’s aware of the limitations and consequences of libriomancy, but even when he has to do questionable things, or is surrounded by danger and the unknown, the good outweighs the bad for him. I like a Reluctant Hero as much as the next girl, but I also like a hero who genuinely loves what he does, and just thinks that it’s impossibly cool to be able to pull a healing potion, a sonic screwdriver (although he can’t figure out how to use it), or a magic sword from the page.

~ Lena Greenwood, the main female character, is incredibly likable and awesome and deeply fascinating. At first she seems to be your standard-issue urban fantasy action heroine, but as the story goes on, we find more about her origins. Created from a (fictitious, but apparently based on an existing work?) pulp fantasy novel, Lena is a nymph whose identity and desires are shaped, to a considerable extent, by those of her lovers. She has made her peace with this and tries to make the best of it, despite the question of whether she can ever truly be her own person (a question with which Isaac struggles considerably as he starts to fall for her). All of this might make Lena and her relationships problematic and uncomfortable for some readers to witness, which is perfectly understandable (I had a few moments of "wait, what?"), but I have the impression that this was intentional, that we're supposed to say "wait, what?" Among other things, Hines seems to be questioning whether it takes a leather jacket, snarky repartee, and the ability to kick vampires in the face to make a Strong Female Character, and what strength actually means. While Lena is bound by her nature, she’s far from passive: she’s capable, warm, funny, self-aware, and is developing agency of her own, which the narrative itself seems invested in her having. Yet her characterization and circumstances raise difficult questions about consent and identity, and even at the story’s resolution, there are still no easy answers.

~ The colorful secondary cast includes but is not limited to a cantankerous immortal Ponce de Leon, an equally immortal and ruthless Johannes Gutenberg, other magic users with their own interests and specialties, a vampire culture that did not make me roll my eyes, and an army of automatons that (shoutout to

baaing_tree!) are essentially golems, though mostly they’re not called that.

~ Nidhi Shah, one of the other secondary characters, is a) a therapist who specializes in magic-users and magical crises, which is a wonderful idea and not one that this genre often features, much less spotlights, and b) someone who has no super-powers of her own but is still intelligent, passionate, and willing and able to make a difference in the world. She spends most of the plot as a hostage and we learn a lot about her secondhand, but I really liked what we saw and look forward to her having a more active role in the sequel.

~ The world-building and magic system are, for the most part, interesting and smart and well-thought-out. I really enjoyed watching Isaac figure out how libriomancy could and could not be used to solve problems.

~ The romantic subplots are queer-positive and polyamory-positive. I was particularly delighted by the latter, as someone who has poly friends and is generally turned off by overwrought love triangles.

~ The familiar “mundanes must not know” attitude prevailed throughout the book, which I did not like so much (I never have). However, the characters do have occasion to ask tricky questions like “Are mind-wipes really the best method of damage control?” and “Is it fair to keep magic a secret instead of using it to help as many people as possible?” even if there are ultimately no real changes to the status quo.

~ The creepy scenes are really creepy. I have more to say about this, and about what’s going on with the antagonist, but it spills over into spoiler territory.

~ Above all, this is – as at least one reviewer has said – a book about loving books. It’s about the wonderful and terrible things that happen when the boundaries between our reality and the world of story dissolve, or can be dissolved. Although these are ideas that many fantasy readers have probably seen before (in books like Seven-Day Magic, Inkheart, or the Thursday Next series), the way that Libriomancer handles those ideas is so engaging that I couldn’t help but love it. And I hope that you love it, too.