The Library at Mount Char

This book by Scott Hawkins is so strange and so big in scope that I sometimes found myself dazed and confused, especially in the first half. But for some reason I persisted, hoping that clarification would eventually ensue. And it does and it was worth the wait and the effort. In this fantasy novel, we meet twelve "adopted" children whose parents all died in some unexplained catastrophe and are now the children of "Father," a nearly omniscient and omnipotent being. He has assigned each of them to master the knowledge accumulated in his library, 12 sections in all. Carolyn, our narrator, is in charge of languages--but not just all the languages ever spoken or written by humans, she must also master the languages of creatures and storms. Her "brothers" and "sisters" are charged with learning about medicine and mathematics and war and animals, etc. They all inhabit a world that is not really connected to existence as we know it, but when Father disappears, the children (now grown) seek to find him before someone or something more terrible than Father steps in to fill the void.
Margaret must look for him in the world of the dead, another sibling searches for him in the various possible futures. Carolyn is selected to search the world as we know it--America is where we meet her--since her command of the English language is the best. But Carolyn's search is only a cover for an elaborate plan of her own, we eventually learn. And when she ultimately succeeds, she will discover that the prize has some definite down sides. Hawkins' work has been compared to that of Neil Gaiman (Library Journal). Kirkus describes it as "A wholly original, engrossing, disturbing, and beautiful book." The Dallas News has a spot-on review; more from Publishers Weekly, and an interview with the author on HuffPost in which he admits he found it fun to "write it so that some of the lines have a slightly different significance when you know what’s really going on." So really, you would have to re-read the whole book to get it all, kind of like the experience I had with the movie The Sixth Sense.