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Housewarming and Histories
Dec. 2nd, 2019 02:58 pmOn Saturday, we went to a housewarming party, where we played (appropriately) 'Welcome To...', a game where you have to decide between pairs of available cards and fill in plots on your playboard to build a new village. Each pair of cards has a number and a special power. You put the number in a house, but the houses in each street have to end up in increasing numerical order (though gaps are allowed and you can sometimes use the same number twice), so careful planning is essential. It was a really fun game, with just enough brain power required to be challenging, but not so complicated that it gave me a headache. I would definitely like to play this again.
Yesterday, I finished reading The Archived by VE Schwab, in which people's lives are filed in a huge Archive after they die, in copies of their bodies called Histories. The protagonist is 16-year-old Mackenzie, who works as a Keeper, given a territory in the shadowy realm between the Archive and the Outer world (called the Narrows). She has a magical piece of paper in her pocket, which lists the names of Histories that have woken up and escaped from the Archive into her territory and she has to go and send them back to the Returns section.
It's a vivid and intriguing setup, and the emotional resonance of the story is extremely effective, as Mackenzie's ten-year-old brother, Ben, has recently died, and her whole family are suffering the repercussions of that. The writing is good, particularly in the action sections, and I liked all the characters, particularly the different Librarians in the Archive. But the logistics of the whole system just didn't really work, and there was a lot about it that made no sense. The author attempted to mitigate this by having Mackenzie complain a lot about the Archive being very secretive about rules and explanations, but highlighting plot holes doesn't really solve them.
The most glaring issue for me was when, towards the end, it said the scratching on Mackenzie's paper (which denotes the adding of a name) became constant, but she didn't look at it or deal with the escaped Histories for at least a day - and then was surprised when the paper was full. At less than ten seconds per name, over the course of 24 hours, her section of the Narrows should have been bursting at the seams by the time she actually got there!
But still, I enjoyed the book, certainly enough to read the sequel, which is actually included in the same volume in my edition.
Yesterday, I finished reading The Archived by VE Schwab, in which people's lives are filed in a huge Archive after they die, in copies of their bodies called Histories. The protagonist is 16-year-old Mackenzie, who works as a Keeper, given a territory in the shadowy realm between the Archive and the Outer world (called the Narrows). She has a magical piece of paper in her pocket, which lists the names of Histories that have woken up and escaped from the Archive into her territory and she has to go and send them back to the Returns section.
It's a vivid and intriguing setup, and the emotional resonance of the story is extremely effective, as Mackenzie's ten-year-old brother, Ben, has recently died, and her whole family are suffering the repercussions of that. The writing is good, particularly in the action sections, and I liked all the characters, particularly the different Librarians in the Archive. But the logistics of the whole system just didn't really work, and there was a lot about it that made no sense. The author attempted to mitigate this by having Mackenzie complain a lot about the Archive being very secretive about rules and explanations, but highlighting plot holes doesn't really solve them.
The most glaring issue for me was when, towards the end, it said the scratching on Mackenzie's paper (which denotes the adding of a name) became constant, but she didn't look at it or deal with the escaped Histories for at least a day - and then was surprised when the paper was full. At less than ten seconds per name, over the course of 24 hours, her section of the Narrows should have been bursting at the seams by the time she actually got there!
But still, I enjoyed the book, certainly enough to read the sequel, which is actually included in the same volume in my edition.
