We’re going backlist today, readers, but I was enamored with this wonderful and unique 2012 standalone YA Fantasy!

I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.

I think the YA categorization must be due to the protagonist’s age, not the sort of themes and issues it deals with. The overarching story is about a rebellion against an oppressive society. The dark aspects are navigated in a relatively gentle way–people die, but not in ways that are gruesomely depicted.

“Pull on a thread, and you pull the whole web. And then out come the spiders…”

Caverna is a city beneath a mountain. Its inhabitants do business with the outside world, but do not go there themselves. Children born there do not learn to mimic their caretaker’s faces, so they must be taught a repetoire of Faces to use at appropriate times (eg. Face No. 41, The Badger in Hibernation, a look of gruff interest).

Neverfell turned up in the Cheesemaster Grandible’s tunnels at the age of five with no memory of her life before, but it is clear she must have come from the outside because her face is constantly and effortlessly expressing the things she is thinking and feeling. This makes her an object of great interest and curiosity for many of Caverna’s denizens, but also puts her in a uniquely vulnerable position. Everyone else has only poker faces, after all, and you can imagine the court intrigue that ensues.

Neverfell wishes to learn where she came from, but whoever erased her memories the first time is willing to prevent that from happening by whatever means necessary.

This book is like what would happen if someone placed effervescent and earnest ingenue Anne of Green Gables in a world just as fantastical and mad, as whimsical and dangerous as the Tower in the Books of Babel by Josiah Bancroft. I loved the crazy cast of characters, from the Kleptomancer to the Cartographers. My favorite was the Grand Steward, though, who brought to mind Sheogorath of the Shivering Isles in the Elder Scrolls games. The leader of Caverna, the Grand Steward has learned to keep himself alive for centuries, but his body has been preserved at the price of his soul, and time has stolen from him the ability to feel any joy, pain, desire, or sorrow. Always alert for assassination attempts, he only allows one side of his brain to sleep at a time. When the right side of his brain sleeps, his right eye is open (being associated as it is with the left side of his brain), and the courtiers know to expect that Right-Eye will be cold but fair, logical to a fault. Left-Eye is the one responsible for any of their ranks falling into or out of favor on a whim.

Right-Eye was not amused. He had known for centuries that he could trust nobody but himself. Now he was seriously starting to wonder about himself.

The Grand Steward finds Neverfell of particular interest because by watching her face as she reacts to things, it’s almost as if he can feel those emotions for himself once again. She also presents him with a rare opportunity for some self-reflection.

Nobody in four hundred years had dared to look at him with such disappointment and saddened anger.

I found these things about the Grand Steward to be such a fun and spectacular part of the story!

A rollicking adventure that addresses some serious themes, the narration of this story was also very funny at times.

For the first time it occurred to Neverfell that perhaps he did not know what to do with stolen goods that did not stay where he put them but instead screamed, ran around, and threatened to eat his correspondence. Perhaps he did not really know what to do with people at all.

All around I found this to be an original, fun, and touching story.

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