It’s not immediately clear which group she can trust. The monastic Keepers who move between the mystical stacks seem like they know the score, but there’s another group who tells Lilah that the Keepers have held back human development for their own ends. (Why didn’t Leonardo DaVinci ever build that helicopter he designed? The Keepers.) And there’s a rather charming young man who connects with Lilah who seems to be firmly anti-Keeper.
Lilah breezes along without sacrificing character development. There are a lot of ideas here,from the secret society to the mystical library, and yet Lilah still seems fully realized. That’s especially impressive when you consider that we know her for all of five pages before the adventure kicks in. She’s really a delightful heroine. And I absolutely love the idea that the Keepers meddled in history to keep humanity from advancing too fast – the fact that this great concept is only the background of a fast-moving adventure story just makes the book seems that much bigger. If feels like an expansive and developed world, even though we really only see a small part of it.
