Review: The Path of Mysteries

The Path of Mysteries by Audrey Auden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tricky one. The author contacted me to ask for a review because I'd enjoyed Book 1 of the series (with some reservations), and although I normally have a firm policy against reviewing by author request, I waive it when I've already read an earlier book by the same author and given it a good review.

This one, though, didn't end up quite working for me. Let me try to unpack why.

First, some positives. The copy editing, even in the pre-publication ARC, is excellent; only a few capitalization issues. The premise is highly original, which is something I look for and, these days, often struggle to find.

Unfortunately, the originality is also one of the negatives, in that it goes so far outside genre expectations that I found myself confused.

I mentioned in my review of the first book that it has too many genres, including post-apocalyptic and YA dystopian (neither of which I usually read), and cosmic and cyberpunk (introduced late in the book). This book leans more into the cosmic and, to a lesser extent, the cyberpunk; the post-apocalyptic isn't that prominent, because the apocalypse was a long time ago and society has re-stabilized and is reasonably comfortable, so it's mainly a reason for the dystopian setup.

That setup was part of what had me confused. It is, first of all, clearly dystopian; men have essentially no access to education, knowledge, or power, which is all in the hands of immortal priestesses. This supposedly results from the aforementioned apocalypse, an environmental collapse caused by the short-sighted and arrogant policies of kings and corrupt priests; the panentheistic deity, the Voice in All, rendered a judgement that elevated the priestesshood, which had remained pure, to power and took away all power from men. Will men ever regain a fuller share in society? In a promise reminiscent of the Soviet Union's promise of a classless utopia, someday, but not yet.

Now, this to me is an obviously dubious explanation. As any up-to-date feminist will tell you, patriarchy harms men as well as women, and many will also admit that women can be complicit even when they have no overt power. The explanation comes from the high priestess, too, who can be counted on to have a major bias.

But one thing that confused me was that in this YA dystopia, the keepers and enforcers of the dystopian situation did not seem malevolent, power-hungry, devious or ruthless, but the leader (or at least a leader) of the resistance, Lilith, was all those things. Ava, one of the two protagonists, had been raised by Lilith to distrust the priestesses, which enabled her to question their justifications for the state of things, but Lilith clearly functioned in the book as an antagonist, and an antagonist that it was easy to despise. Perhaps this is a subtle subversion of the black-and-white tropes of YA dystopian, reminding us that there are people of goodwill and even wisdom among the maintainers of oppressive systems, and people of ill will among those who want to tear those systems down. But even as an adult reader who believes this, I wasn't sure where to put my support. The political structure and the tropes were pointing one way, the structure of the relationships within the book the other, and it left me scratching my head. Maybe that's intentional, but purely in terms of a fiction-reading experience, it wasn't optimal for me.

The other thing that confused me is that, despite a heavy preponderance of exposition over plot, especially early on, I never did get straight how the "branches" of the book's cosmic aspect worked. They seemed to be a version of the many worlds hypothesis of quantum physics, which was supported by some technobabble about storing information in quantum computers to make it available across multiple branches; but because it was closely intertwined with the cosmic aspects, and those weren't really clear, I was never sure how the presence of the same characters on multiple branches worked, and whether there was a reincarnation aspect or not. Dom, the second protagonist and Ava's love interest, is present on branches in advanced versions of our world's San Francisco as a middle-aged man rather than the teenager he is on Ava's world, but he appears to remember a youth in her world; that was never explained, and Ava never asked about it.

I was left with a lot more questions than answers at the end of the book, in fact. Others include: why, a couple of pages after stating that only Ava, of all the girls, spoke to him or knew his name at the Children's Temple, does Dom reminisce about his close relationship with Hana at that same place? If a Muse is made a Muse by an Artifex choosing to do a major project with her, and Dom, as an Artifex, is expected to choose "a Muse," and there appear to have only been two Artifexes prior to Dom, why are there more than two Muses? Why do two of the Muses have the names of Greek muses appropriate to what their specialty is, while the others don't? Why, in fact, are the names in general (both people and places) a grab bag from half a dozen different cultures' mythologies? How does food production in this society work? (That last question was left over from the first volume.)

Unfortunately, I didn't find this book compelling enough to persevere with the series in the faint hope of getting answers. Ultimately, there wasn't enough plot per thousand words, and despite the mass of exposition - mostly of the cosmic aspect - I ended the book without a clear idea of where the story was going, how the world(s) worked, or even where my sympathies lay. It's unfortunate; it has the opposite problem to most of the new books I pick up for review, in that while it's well edited and original in concept, in terms of its storytelling and emotional arc I found it didn't work so well for me.

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