The Library at Mount Char

This was fun, weird, right up my alley. Mr Hawkins has a good twisty plot and vivid characters described … vividly, but the secret sauce is that he combines the mundane world with the fantastical in surprising ways and pulls this trick off through out the 400ish pages.

Carolyn stretched her hand out to touch the bronze handle protruding from the deer’s torso. The metal was warm. It trembled slightly under her fingertips, magnifying the faint, fading vibrations of [the deer] Isha’s gentle heart.

My attempt at a synopsis teaser: there is a god, a Zeus-like true master of the universe living quietly, secretly yet in plain sight in a forgotten suburb of New Jersey. In 1978 as part of his retirement plan he adopted a dozen orphans, taught them his native language, “Pelapa”, and began rigorously training the children in diverse schools of knowledge so that one of them would be his heir. But now twenty five years later god, their adopted father, has disappeared and his now demi-god children have gathered together at his home, a magical Library of Babel, to find (and possibly resurrect) him because his godly rivals will surely move to take over as the new boss as soon as they realize he is missing. Carolyn is the daughter who has learned languages (every language past, present and future, and not just human languages) and in this time of crisis her job is to help her siblings as a liaison to “the Americans” (she is the only one still fluent in English) but at the same time Carolyn has her own plan for this crisis…