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A review by ihateprozac
The Archived by V.E. Schwab
5.0
If you enjoyed the TV series The Lost Room or Philip K Dick story and film adaptation The Adjustment Bureau, you will ADORE this.
The Archived centres around a teenage girl named Mackenzie who lives a double life where she returns the dead. When you die, a copy of your body and its history is sent to an Archive to rest, and these copies are called Histories. Except sometimes these Histories don’t stay down. Mackenzie is tasked with finding Histories who’ve woken up and gone AWOL, returning them to the Archive where they can be filed away and put to sleep once again. Unfortunately for Mackenzie, something is going catastrophically wrong with the Histories in her territory and the Archive is about to come crashing down.
Much like Schwab’s Monsters of Verity series, this is a concept that shouldn’t work and yet totally does. The Archived has such a bizarre mythology; reminiscent of The Lost Room, The Adjustment Bureau and Hades’ halls of the dead in Greek mythology, and yet it reads as totally unique. It gave me fantastical doorways to the unknown, a mysterious library full of secrets, a parallel world alongside our own, and a gripping storyline of an unknown force threatening to destroy it all. AKA ALL MY FAVOURITE THINGS.
Victoria Schwab has such an incredible, immersive, atmospheric quality to her writing. Everytime Mackenzie ventured in and out of The Narrows I could practically see the lighting change, shifting from the dusty bright Coronado Hotel to the dim, blue veil of The Narrows. I could feel the quiet of the Narrows and how it differed from the quiet of the Coronado, peppered with the odd creaky floorboard or noise of cars outside on the street. I could feel the physical jumps and starts Mackenzie had when exposed to someone’s touch, unable to drown out the noise inside her head. It’s so rare for me to completely lose myself in a book this way, I’d almost forgot it was possible.
The conflict was perfectly paced and you can feel the tension ramping up to eleven, almost as if a Tarantino score is playing in the background with violin strings winding tighter and tighter until they threaten to snap. I had guessed a couple of the big reveals,but the way in which it all unfolded was unexpected and had me stressed and physically gripping my book, desperately thumbing through the pages to find out how it all ends.
Put simply: Victoria Schwab fucking NAILED this.
I only have one minor criticism of this story, and that's the way Schwab uses technology and family/friends. In a lot of these stories where characters life a double life and have one foot in the paranormal world, they have absent family and friends and often aren't good with phones or computers. This enables them to pursue their paranormal missions without having family and friends actively worrying about them, and the author doesn't have to deal with someone's Facebook notifications pinging in the middle of a fight. I always feel as if the no-tech protag with no friends/parents is a cheap literary device and almost makes the characters less relatable for me. Sure, Mackenzie did have instances where she had to lie to her parents about her whereabouts, but I just want something more realistic from teenage protagonists in modern books.
Overall: Schwab’s worldbuilding and mythology is incredible, she creates concepts and universes that shouldn’t work and yet absolutely suck you in. She has such an immersive, atmospheric quality to her writing that made me feel as if I were physically travelling The Narrows with our protagonist, and once the mystery started to ramp up it was unputdownable. I am so glad I picked this up, and yet so emo to learn that the series may never be completed!
The Archived centres around a teenage girl named Mackenzie who lives a double life where she returns the dead. When you die, a copy of your body and its history is sent to an Archive to rest, and these copies are called Histories. Except sometimes these Histories don’t stay down. Mackenzie is tasked with finding Histories who’ve woken up and gone AWOL, returning them to the Archive where they can be filed away and put to sleep once again. Unfortunately for Mackenzie, something is going catastrophically wrong with the Histories in her territory and the Archive is about to come crashing down.
Much like Schwab’s Monsters of Verity series, this is a concept that shouldn’t work and yet totally does. The Archived has such a bizarre mythology; reminiscent of The Lost Room, The Adjustment Bureau and Hades’ halls of the dead in Greek mythology, and yet it reads as totally unique. It gave me fantastical doorways to the unknown, a mysterious library full of secrets, a parallel world alongside our own, and a gripping storyline of an unknown force threatening to destroy it all. AKA ALL MY FAVOURITE THINGS.
Victoria Schwab has such an incredible, immersive, atmospheric quality to her writing. Everytime Mackenzie ventured in and out of The Narrows I could practically see the lighting change, shifting from the dusty bright Coronado Hotel to the dim, blue veil of The Narrows. I could feel the quiet of the Narrows and how it differed from the quiet of the Coronado, peppered with the odd creaky floorboard or noise of cars outside on the street. I could feel the physical jumps and starts Mackenzie had when exposed to someone’s touch, unable to drown out the noise inside her head. It’s so rare for me to completely lose myself in a book this way, I’d almost forgot it was possible.
The conflict was perfectly paced and you can feel the tension ramping up to eleven, almost as if a Tarantino score is playing in the background with violin strings winding tighter and tighter until they threaten to snap. I had guessed a couple of the big reveals,but the way in which it all unfolded was unexpected and had me stressed and physically gripping my book, desperately thumbing through the pages to find out how it all ends.
Put simply: Victoria Schwab fucking NAILED this.
I only have one minor criticism of this story, and that's the way Schwab uses technology and family/friends. In a lot of these stories where characters life a double life and have one foot in the paranormal world, they have absent family and friends and often aren't good with phones or computers. This enables them to pursue their paranormal missions without having family and friends actively worrying about them, and the author doesn't have to deal with someone's Facebook notifications pinging in the middle of a fight. I always feel as if the no-tech protag with no friends/parents is a cheap literary device and almost makes the characters less relatable for me. Sure, Mackenzie did have instances where she had to lie to her parents about her whereabouts, but I just want something more realistic from teenage protagonists in modern books.
Overall: Schwab’s worldbuilding and mythology is incredible, she creates concepts and universes that shouldn’t work and yet absolutely suck you in. She has such an immersive, atmospheric quality to her writing that made me feel as if I were physically travelling The Narrows with our protagonist, and once the mystery started to ramp up it was unputdownable. I am so glad I picked this up, and yet so emo to learn that the series may never be completed!