Reviews with content warning for Violence - Archivist Wasp

Interesting take on a post apocalyptic world in which young women fight each other to the death in order to shepherd the dead across the bridge to beyond and find rest, or so we think. Slow-paced but not overly so, read this in one sitting. Not sure I agree that this book is YA really, but an inventive foray into the genre. Not quite SF and not quite F for me, this book falls somewhere in between.

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thehonestpuck's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Wasp is an Archivist, tasked with hunting ghosts for scraps of clues about the pre-apocalyptic past and forced to defend her position in yearly death matches against other girls. Then she meets a ghost who wants a favor from her: to help him find his close friend in the ghost world. Archivist Wasp (and its sequel Latchkey) is an incredible story about friendship, self-discovery, and learning the history of a broken world. There is remarkably complete worldbuilding laid out in relatively sparse details, fully fleshed out characters and character relationships, and a beautiful foregrounding of intense platonic relationships (that in the sequel includes larger community-building).

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booksthatburn's review

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mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

ARCHIVIST WASP is a journey of two lonely beings who don’t know how to drop their knives long enough not to wound after asking for help.

I love the blend of supernatural and technological pieces that build the post-apocalypse world of ARCHIVIST WASP. The titular Archivist, Wasp, hangs on to her life through sheer force of will at times as she tries to help Ghost find someone he lost before both of them died long ago. Wasp and Ghost slowly gain a synergy of understanding and movement through their temporarily shared purpose, shown partly through how Wasp is more and more able to understand and anticipate Ghost’s actions as they fight together for their lives with disturbing regularity.

This uses what in most other books would be shared memories, except Wasp is seeing the memories that Ghost has lost, meaning that he's sometimes strangely unsuited to helping her figure them out. Through these memories Wasp gains an understanding of a small piece of the pre-Apocalyptic world which Ghost inhabited, the shattering and slow decay of which built Wasp's own world.

I love the ending, it's more hopeful than I thought it'd be, and it works well.

I read this after having read FIREBREAK and therefore entered it full of bittersweet sorrow just from the synopsis. This was published first and can be read either first or second. It is not a new thing for the order of a series to be complicated, later books are set before earlier ones, but usually there's a sense of what is known and unknown in each of them. This is different. I cannot imagine what it would be like to read ARCHIVIST WASP without having first read FIREBREAK, for the parts of the ghost which are handed to me here are so linked that it feels like ARCHIVIST WASP is filling in the missing pieces, soothing the parts of me that were rent asunder by the saga of corporate greed and deep grief that is FIREBREAK. Having said that, I've done my best to review ARCHIVIST WASP on its own terms, as a book that was published before FIREBREAK and didn't know it would ever get a sequel, let alone the quasi-prequel/related stand-alone journey that is FIREBREAK, or the sequel that is LATCHKEY.

It’s my personal opinion that you’ll have a fulfilling experience whether you read this first or second, but if you prefer to feel like you have more answers before you at once, start with FIREBREAK and then you’ll be better prepared for ARCHIVIST WASP and then move on to LATCHKEY. If you’d like to feel as though you’re powerless to stop a tragedy whose ending was written long ago, but nevertheless still breaks your heart and makes you hope for a better future, begin with ARCHIVIST WASP and then you can read FIREBREAK (I suspect for this reading it would be better to follow publishing order and read LATCHKEY between them).

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smitinghedgehog's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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