Myne’s own family of an artisan and a soldier are wholly out of their depth when it comes to her illness. A festival of particular seasonal significance at the Church is celebrated under a different name by the city folk, for whom it is a far rowdier celebration. Myne thus lives much of her early days oblivious about the gods. For example, the religion with its many gods of nature and seasons has a largely agricultural focus and as such largely irrelevant to the day to day lives of the city folk. The worldbuilding emphasises the many fissures within society, with each strata and subculture having their own distinctive norms and mores, shaped by their specific circumstances. Slowly, Myne’s world grows beyond the four walls of her tiny home and the finite knowledge of her parents and so the setting expands and deepens. Of all the things from her former life that she has lost through death, books are the only thing that she can recreate in this world. Books carry for Myne an emotional, even totemic significance. Her love of books extends beyond the desire for stories or entertainment she adores the tactile experience of reading and worships the written language itself for its ability to preserve and transmit knowledge. As a sickly child, her reach is finite and her efforts frequently misunderstood and undone by her friends and family, but she perseveres. Ascendance engages with every detail of book production and even though I can absolutely nitpick details and even common misunderstandings, it is an utter delight to see Myne struggle her way through trying to singlehandedly bring about a print revolution. They are objects of luxury and purpose, after all. Libraries are not built overnight and each book needs to be written and bound by someone.
#The ascendance of a bookworm series#
The religion itself feels a fascinating mix of Greco-Roman paganism and Japanese Shinto.Īs someone who has always regarded vast libraries in medaissance fantasy novels with suspicion – who assembled these books and why? – there is a distinct pleasure in reading this series deconstruct them. Arguably less obvious an influence is Heian Japan’s myriad courtly rituals, where strict etiquette governed the behaviour of nobles and careful elegance was paramount. The setting of Ascendance is inspired by medieval Germany, from its lengthy names to its loose confederation of powerful and largely independent duchies strongly reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire. After a lifetime of obsessive bibliophilia, Urano Motosu is crushed to death by a bookcase during an earthquake and awakens in the body of Myne, a feverish five year old girl in a medieval world devoid of books.
Quick Review of Miya Kazuki’s Ascendance of the Bookworm: I’ll Stop at Nothing to Become a LibrarianĪscendance of the Bookworm is a love letter to the book itself, not just its contents of word and stories, but the physical object.
0 kommentar(er)
