I saw a recent QOTD that asked what was the last book that surprised me, and I now have an answer! Going into The Naming Song I expected something heavily fantasy and magic-based,  but what I got was nearly dystopian with magic that wasn’t magic—until it was! I think the best way to describe this book is literary magical realism??? The world of the Naming Song is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the apocalypse took away words and language and as words were rediscovered, committees rose to create order from the chaos. 

This book is so hard to describe because it has a fantasy feel despite it’s dystopian plot; I’d almost call it a cozy mystery as the MC, the unnamed courier who straddles both the world of the named (as a courier) and the borders of the nameless (having no name herself), begins to unravel a web of connections between the two worlds and find answers to who she is how the world should be vs. how those with the power of naming want it to be. 

It was so interesting to me that this world essentially used magic but in a way that made it more like science and technology—there are ghosts and monsters, but their explanations for being seem perfectly scientific and not magical at all. Later in the book there is a way to use words called spelling (and I absolutely adored the wordplay because in a world when words are being rediscovered and there is no name even for the alphabet, spelling might not mean the same thing to them as it does to us, but of course reeks of magic!) that causes reality to bend in the way the user needs it to—for instance, saying “light” but using spell illuminates an area, or spelling “sleep” will knock unconscious the people around the speller! This book straddles science and magic the same way the inhabitants of the book live in between the named and unnamed!

This book was entertaining and thought-provoking—so clearly carefully crafted—down to the very last word and was so pleasantly surprising, it was absolutely five stars!

The Naming Song was a Macmillan Audio pick!