Title: Archivist Wasp
Series: Archivist Wasp Saga #1
Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic/Fantasy
Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, dead children, ghosts, physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse
Read To: 25%
Back Cover:
Wasp’s job is simple. Hunt ghosts. And every year she has to fight to remain Archivist. Desperate and alone, she strikes a bargain with the ghost of a supersoldier. She will go with him on his underworld hunt for the long-lost ghost of his partner and in exchange she will find out more about his pre-apocalyptic world than any Archivist before her. And there is much to know. After all, Archivists are marked from birth to do the holy work of a goddess. They’re chosen. They’re special. Or so they’ve been told for four hundred years.
Archivist Wasp fears she is not the chosen one, that she won’t survive the trip to the underworld, that the brutal life she has escaped might be better than where she is going. There is only one way to find out.
Review:
There is a remarkably long list of things in this book that generally I really like in books:
- Badass girls with badass names who are good at fighting
- Being chosen to do the holy work of a goddess, especially if said holy work involves said fighting
- Characters visiting underworlds on quests
- Ghost hunters
- That hint that Archivists are maybe not as special as they’ve been told for the last four centuries
- All of this is also in a post-apocalypse world
And yet there were just too many things I couldn’t get past to enjoy the story.
The story opens with Wasp in a fight – well, actually at the end of a fight. She lets her opponent live for unclear reasons, and I was already a little off balance trying to figure out why Wasp was letting this girl live when it’s made very clear that she’s killed at least nine people before and not seemed to have any issue with that. It was a very confusing move from a character I had literally just met and I didn’t understand Wasp’s world or motivations enough to figure out what exactly was going on here.
It turns out not killing her opponent is a really really big deal because all the spectators want to see someone die (maybe because that’s what happens in these fights?) and There Can Only Be One. There is only one Archivist but a bunch of “Upstarts,” and every year three Upstarts fight the current Archivist one after the other. If the Archivist kills all three Upstarts, she stays Archivist another year. If she dies, the Upstart who kills her becomes the new Archivist.
That was really the part that I couldn’t get past. It’s an incredibly ineffient system. The goddess apparently wants the Archivists to capture ghosts, learn as much as they can about pre-apocalypse life from them, then send them on to the afterlife. But there’s only one Archivist at a time, she could very likely be killed and replaced every year, and the only one who actually knows how to do anything with ghosts is the current Archivist who explicitly doesn’t tell anyone. Even with all the notes the Archivists take, that’s not at all an efficient system.
Also, the Archivist and the Upstarts all seem to be under the authority of a priest of the goddess, who is violent, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive seemingly for the joy of hurting people he hates and knowing he’ll get away with it because he has nearly complete authority over them. I couldn’t figure out why he hated them so much, though, and that made his hatefulness seem excessive and gratuitous.
I really wanted to like this book, but the reasonless hatred of the priest and the incredible ineffeciency of the Archivist system killed the suspension of disbelief for me. I can absolutely see how other people would enjoy it. I just couldn’t make it work for me.
The Archivist Wasp Saga:
- Archivist Wasp
- Latchkey
- Currently Untitled
Bluejay Reads 