I can’t find it on Twitter now, but someone started a thread for people to recommend VERY LONG books, and someone else responded by recommending The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox (Target link, Amazon link). I don’t think I follow any of the people involved—not that “seeing tweets by people whose tweets you want to see” has ever been Twitter’s plan or interest, but it does make it harder to re-find the tweet I’m looking for. And as it happens, I WAS glad to have seen the tweet, and I wish I could find it again because whatever they said about this book was enough for me to request it from my library system and read it without knowing any more, and so I would like to wield that tweet at you and see if it makes YOU go read the book.

(image from Target.com)

I linked to the paperbacks because Target has only the paperback available and it bothered me to link to one paperback and one hardcover; but Amazon’s hardcover price is actually less than the paperback price right now, and now that I have finished reading the book I have ordered a copy for myself in hardcover, because this book seems too thick to be manageable in paperback. If I hadn’t been so impulsive, I would have instead bought a copy from eBay. And for you, I recommend being even less impulsive than THAT and seeing if your library system has it.

I think the very best way to read it is to go into it without knowing anything about it: that’s one reason I’m recommending LIBRARY, because then you can follow that advice at no risk at all. The tweet I can’t remember used a description that was something about it being a book that “had everything” and “didn’t even seem long” and “you’ll wish it were longer,” and that seems pretty good to me as an enticement. Also, I might be making those quotes up. Those might be things I’D say about it.

I will leave a little spacer here for those of you who would like to go get the book and read it without knowing anything about it, and then I will go on to discuss a little more about it, for those of you who aren’t going to read it otherwise, and for those of you who might be looking at it as a gift idea.

I will be giving what I would consider vague, fair-game spoilers: they will be about the TYPE of book it is, with some mention of THEMES and ELEMENTS, plus things you could get by reading the book flap. I personally was glad to have read it without receiving these vague, fair-game spoilers—but if I HAD received these vague, fair-game spoilers, I would not have considered the book spoiled. It’ll be the equivalent of, like, telling you that a book is a light funny romance, when maybe you wouldn’t have guessed that from the cover because, unlike every single other light funny romance coming out right now, maybe the book in question didn’t have a sherbet-colored cover with cartoonily-drawn characters (perhaps a glasses-wearing woman who has lost one of her high-heeled shoes is being pushed in a wheelbarrow by a tousle-haired man in a business suit!) and a whimsical, children’s-book-esque title such as Fiona McFly Gets By or whatever.

La la la. We are waiting for some of us to leave. We will not be talking about anything you can’t come back and read LATER, after you have first read the book without knowing anything about it.

La la la. Just filling some space.

La la. It’s not even going to be something you’ll want to come back and read later, I don’t think, because I’m still only going to speak about it in general terms.

La la la. Loop-de-doo.

This is the KIND of book that starts out seeming like one kind of book (a book that takes place in our familiar reality, albeit with the rage-inducing murder of a main character’s sister in the very first sentence), and then after a hundred or so pages following this main character’s life and feelings and memories and family, the book abruptly makes a shift into a book with magic and other worlds and mythical beings and so forth. Like the Narnia books, kind of, where first some kids are spending their holidays with some old uncle in some old house, and then abruptly they’re in a snowy forest and there’s a talking faun. I greatly enjoyed encountering this shift with NO PRIOR WARNING: I was amazed and enchanted. But if I’d known about the shift, it would only have made me MORE likely to read the book, so.

It is a LONG book, but it did not feel long, and I wanted there to be more of it. There are parts that are easy to race right past, because you want to get to the next part of the action—and then you realize you raced right past some of the action because it was so calmly told. There is real-life peril! There is a lot of mixed religious/mythological stuff: Odin! Purgatory! Angels! Demons! Souls! Ancient scrolls! Special swords! There are underlying themes of stolen land, stolen people, bad bargains that no one fixes because it’s been so long with things the way they are. There’s some environmental stuff, and there are some brief parts about food/nutrition that made me a little eye-roll-y. There is friendship! romance! superior species / inferior species interactions! other kinds of relationships! There’s a lil bit of sex, but it’s not explicit. There are themes about secrets, and family, and revenge, and regret. There’s MAGIC! SHAPE-SHIFTING! PORTALS TO OTHER WORLDS! I had a lot of fun reading it, and would definitely want to read it again.