A Review of Traci Chee’s The Reader (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, year? )

 

This book has gotten a ton of advance praise. Fortunately, I didn’t read any reviews or had seen the accolades before I read it. The folks at B&N can give us some useful editorial blurbage: “Sefia knows what it means to survive. After her father is brutally murdered, she flees into the wilderness with her aunt Nin, who teaches her to hunt, track, and steal. But when Nin is kidnapped, leaving Sefia completely alone, none of her survival skills can help her discover where Nin’s been taken, or if she’s even alive. The only clue to both her aunt’s disappearance and her father’s murder is the odd rectangular object her father left behind, an object she comes to realize is a book—a marvelous item unheard of in her otherwise illiterate society. With the help of this book, and the aid of a mysterious stranger with dark secrets of his own, Sefia sets out to rescue her aunt and find out what really happened the day her father was killed—and punish the people responsible.” There’s quite a lot going on narratologically with this book. The third person narration shifts between at least three different diegetic contexts and potentially even temporalities. The main one obviously follows Sefia and her quest to attain revenge upon those who killed her father and kidnapped Nin. Sefia lives in a complicated fictional world based upon a fantasy-type reality in which there are various cities and empires and peoples who are at war with each other. There are individuals who have the ability to wield various forms of magic, while others harness the power of young boys and force them to fight each other. Sefia is able to save one of these young boys,—the editorial description calls him “a mysterious stranger with dark secrets of his own”—and the two become allies. The young boy, Archer, is particularly skilled in hand to hand combat due his time being forced to fight and kill other boys. Much of the novel is spent following these two characters on their quest. Their plot eventually catches up with another related to Captain Reed, who is on a treasure trove quest aboard the high seas. At some point, Sefia and Archer inadvertently become stowaways on Captain Reed’s ship. Due to a highly trained assassin attempting to kill Sefia and Archer—indeed, the mysterious book that Sefia possesses is the subject of much conflict—they must come out of hiding and take their place amongst the colorful crew aboard the ship. Readers will have already noticed that Captain Reed is a character contained in the book Sefia is carrying, so it becomes evident that the magical tome that Sefia wields is one that contains the story of all the peoples ever in existence. You’d expect this to be one gigantic book, but guess what? This world is MAGICAL, so the book isn’t so heavy; a diminutive, resourceful young girl like Sefia can still hold it, even as assassins and deadly forces follow her everywhere to try to obtain it. Eventually Captain Reed and Sefia/ Archer have to part ways. Sefia is still on her quest for revenge, which takes her finally to meet the big bad of book 1. I’ll end there in terms of that particular storyline. The other diegetic/temporal sequence involves a man named Lon and an Assassin; this plot line is totally confusing at first. It has seemingly NOTHING to do with Sefia’s plot except we generally know that it’s occurring within the same fictional world. When an assassin emerges in Sefia’s own part of the world, we know that there may be a stronger connection between the two narratives, but it is not apparent until the conclusion when the Big Bad reveals more information about Sefia’s past. Needless to say, Chee does follow the formula inherent to most YA paranormal fictions: she’s a not-so-ordinary young teen, who must defeat a tremendous evil force, all the while capturing the affections of an appropriately aged, gallant of heart man. The other element that readers will eventually enjoy and perhaps understand is the fictional conceit of a world in which the very act of reading is outlawed. Books are banished. We are thus lead to participate in an act of defiance anytime we engage in Sefia’s quest, which is not unlike a kuntslerroman in the sense that she’s coming into her consciousness as a reader and possibly a writer of words. The next installment is called The Speaker, which will be published in not too long. I can’t imagine that the last book will be anything other than The Writer to round out the all-hallowed trilogy sequencing.

 

Buy the Book Here:

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-reader-traci-chee/1121798809#productInfoTabs