Review: The Carousel of Forgotten Places

The Carousel of Forgotten Places by S. Hati
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up because of the original premise, but ended up being disappointed with the execution.

The protagonist and narrator is Ryka, a woman of Indian heritage brought up in the US, who has spent almost five centuries as the Timekeeper in a magical pocket dimension created by a time god, from which she undertakes expeditions to repair timelines that have somehow become corrupted (exactly how or why this happens routinely is not explored in any detail). The founding time god's brother Everest is generally around and plays an important role in the time repairs. Despite being demisexual, or perhaps because of it, she is in lust with him, but doesn't want to mess up their working relationship by doing anything about it.

Ryka is self-pitying, emotionally immature despite her 500 years, and one of those people who make sure that everyone around them shares in their bad mood, and she makes some poor decisions even though she should have both the intelligence and the experience to know better. Everest is flaky, unreliable and lacking in empathy. That was never a ship I was going to be on board with; I have to like both members of a couple to care about whether they end up together, and I didn't like either of them.

Among a good few small imperfections, the most prominent one for me was the implausible reason for the MC to understand languages. Because she has been visiting various places and times for a little less than 500 years, she has "developed fluency in most languages" (according to her). There are about 7000 languages currently spoken in our world, and of course many more (and many mutually unintelligible earlier versions) throughout history, and this book has divergent timelines too, so... well over 10,000. And she later claims it is "thousands," so the "most" is probably not intended as a rhetorical flourish, or to refer only to languages with a large number of speakers.

Clearly nobody, no matter how good their memory, could become fluent in "most" of those 10,000 languages, even in 500 years. Even if we're very generous and say it's 4000 (most of 7000), that's a language every six weeks, and we know (because we're told) that her memory isn't supernaturally perfect. It's absurd.

It would be absurd even if she was immersed in each language continuously for the whole six weeks, doing nothing but learning it by constantly interacting with native speakers. But she's not. She undertakes very short missions about once a week, each one to a random place and time and never to the same place and time on two consecutive occasions, and actively avoids engaging with anyone if she can help it. The languages claim is, honestly, less plausible than if you just say that her supernatural role as the Keeper of Time gives her fluency in all languages. Sure, she also has a magical library which can presumably produce books from which she could learn languages, but that's not the claim she's making.

If we set that nonsense aside, though, and assume that the excess hyphens and vocabulary glitches will be fixed between the pre-publication version I had via Netgalley and when the book comes out, and ignore the fact that the romance is between two people I don't much care for or about, the book is... OK. Fairly simple plot (Ryka messes up and has to fix it, and this helps her somehow to get over herself at last), interesting and whimsical world, secondary characters that are adequate for their roles.

I didn't love it. That's probably just me; other people seem to like it fine. Perhaps you will too.

View all my reviews