The Republic of Memory
The world this book introduces is fascinating – the characters, the Safina, the world it left behind – and that’s why I’m rating this as highly as I am because this isn’t a complete novel. This is part one of a story. There is rising action, I suppose, but I don’t know if it’s a personal issue I have or how many others feel the same, but a novel, especially a genre novel, should generally have a beginning, middle, and end – an arc, which resolves at the end. That doesn’t mean it has to resolve everything, but this book had just finished introducing the stakes when it ended. My feeling is that a novel that is a part of a saga still needs to have its own sub-story, and this one didn’t. I realized when I had half an hour left in the audiobook that unless something really surprising happened, the plot I thought I had been following was not going to come to a climax in this book, and I was right. I’ll probably pick up the next, whenever it comes out, because I do want to know more, but it’s the same wanting-to-know-more as if I’d only finished a chapter.
The “new patois” of the novel’s youth felt extremely stilted in the audiobook narrator’s voice – things like “donde are” being enunciated made it feel much less convincing as a new vernacular, and much more contrived, phony. But I’m willing to grant the benefit of the doubt that it reads better in one’s mind.