An Unusual Library and an Unequalled Journey by Theresa Gauthier

 The Library of Legends by Janie Chang

I first heard about this book on my favorite podcast, What Should I Read Next? Host Anne Bogel helps one guest each week decide what book to read. Sometimes a guest is in a reading slump. Sometimes a guest wants to explore an unfamiliar genre. Sometimes the guest has lost all their books (and indeed everything else) in a fire and need to rebuild. Whatever the reason, Anne Bogel always has several fascinating suggestions.

The Library of Legends by Janie Chang was first published in May 2020. This was the only time in my adult life that I didn’t visit a bookstore one to seven days in a week. It makes me wonder what other gems I missed that year.

In a brilliant blending of historical novel and fantasy, Chang blends  World War II China with a subtle presence of Chinese mythological beings, some tied to characters in unique ways and others literally passing through the story. In any case, these characters all come to vivid life on the page as they navigate Japanese air strikes, occupation, and a long journey through China the students undertake to save their university library.

This understated mystery around these mythological beings, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it blends with the story somehow making both the realism and the magical halves more believable, more connected and possessing an absolute charm.

I was entranced. The characters all have their own struggles, but it’s Lian, the female protagonist, whose journey drives the story. When she meets the Star Willow—or rather when she realizes she’s already met the Star Willow and didn’t recognize her for the immortal she is, Lian begins to see things differently. Noticing what she might not have before, daring to question Star Willow and reasoning things out in her own head as she sees Star Willow’s tragedy from a human perspective, Lian compares what she and her classmates, and indeed her entire country, are going through to the immortal’s unending suffering.

When Star Willow and Lian’s classmate retrace their university caravan’s steps back to the city of Shanghai, they meet their own challenges. It’s in Shanghai that Lian sees how complicated everything is. Searching a city of that size for her displaced mother becomes more urgent after she learns her university, presuming her dead when she disappeared, wrote to her mother telling her of Lian’s death. 

What follows—reunions, separations, the threat of homelessness, Lian’s attempt to be fair to Star Willow, and Star Willow’s slow realization of what her presence on earth, her wish for her own true love, has done—this is a book that hits on all levels. Engrossing, enlightening, brilliant. This is one of those books that’s going to send me searching for the author’s other titles.