Ropa doesn’t do charity cases (“Emotional blackmail don’t work on me. There’s been a spate of recent child abductions in the city and stories of a creepy Milkman, and she cannot rest, fearing that Oliver has become a victim. One night Ropa talks to Nicola, a mother recently gone to the realm known as the everyThere, but cannot move on as her son Oliver has disappeared. Sassy without being annoying or malicious, Ropa is a pleasingly well-rounded character who quickly engages with the reader. Told in the first-person throughout, Ropa is a lively, intelligent and likeable personality. Like some sort of teenage Harry Dresden, Ropa spends her nights travelling around Edinburgh talking to spirits that only she can see and using her Zimbabwean magic to take commissions for passing messages on to those still on Earth – providing that they can pay, of course! This all sounds quite sad, though Ropa is resilient enough to explain all of this with a degree of humour.Īnd that’s what is this book’s strength. However, in this place magic is real – her unpleasant landlord is actually a troll – and Ropa has the ability to speak to the dead, which she uses to bring some income in. So far this could be some sort of dystopian social commentary on a future-teenage wasteland.

Having given up on school, but independent enough to realise that she needs to educate herself, Ropa spends much of her time each month trying to scrape the money together to pay for their rent and get her Gran her much-needed meds. (In some sort of creepy Prisoner-like way the traditional greeting seems to be “God save the king” to which the respondent reply is “Long may he reign.”) Her background seems rather typical of many in this future. She lives with her Gran and her younger sister on a caravan park in some sort of alternative or future Edinburgh.

TL Huchu’s debut novel not only has a secret library as a place in its pages but is proud enough to have it as the book’s title. (Which makes me think: there might be an article in there somewhere…) What that also means, I guess, is that a book with a library as a setting already starts with an advantage for me, and I suspect for some others. Because, you know: books! Untapped knowledge, things to discover, to educate, to entertain, all in one place. Are you one of those people who enter a library almost with a sigh of relief, with a feeling of “coming home”? Even now, when much of my reading is done digitally and with my own physical copies, walking through the doors of such a place makes me smile.

Library of the dead tl huchu