No, I won’t be up until midnight reading. I haven’t stayed up on New Year’s Eve for years. Maybe decades. My New Year comes in September, with the start of each new school year.
Today, I want to tell about a small book that has been overlooked by many. It is not a book for everyone. There is little happiness in it, but there is power.
Publisher’s Summary: Wasp’s job is simple. Hunt ghosts. And every year she has to fight to remain Archivist. Desperate and alone, she strikes a bargain with the ghost of a supersoldier. She will go with him on his underworld hunt for the long-long ghost of his partner and in exchange she will find out more about his pre-apocalyptic world than any Archivist before her. And there is much to know. After all, Archivists are marked from birth to do the holy work of a goddess. They’re chosen. They’re special. Or so they’ve been told for four hundred years.
Archivist Wasp fears she is not the chosen one, that she won’t survive the trip to the underworld, that the brutal life she has escaped might be better than where she is going. There is only one way to find out.
Wasp is an anti-hero on a classic hero’s journey. There is no romance, as there is in so many fantasy books. It opens with Wasp’s most recent fight in which she has to win to maintain her position, a position she often loathes. She feels trapped.Until she meets the nameless ghost who asks her to help him find someone. Along the way, as one might expect on a hero’s journey, Wasp learns as much about herself as she does about the world that came before the post-apocalyptic world in which she lives.
It is such an intriguing mix of fantasy, myth and science fiction. Archivist Wasp is no beach read, but it is full of well-developed characters, excellent world building and beautiful writing.
booksandbassets 