The Archived

Book Title: The Archived

Author: Victoria Schwab
Series: The Archived #1

Date Started: July 24th 2017

Date Completed: July 29th 2017

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Mystery, Contemporary
Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Five Star

Final Rating: Five stars

Review:

Again, Victoria has crafted a whimsical and exciting story that grows and blossoms as you read it. As brilliant as she is at writing stories that are perfectly contained on their own, you always want her to expand them further and on larger scales - The Archived is no exception.

Vic knows how to write big things on a small scale. Her action is cohesive and visceral, but without being a twenty-page climactic battle. The worlds her stories take place in feel massive and solid past the parts of it that we see - and we sometimes see very little. In The Archived, for example, Mac sees only a fraction of the mysterious organisation that she works for yet there's a sense that it stretches for miles and miles past what she can immediately see. It what makes her books so exciting; the things that happen, but the potential for what else is out there.

I admit, it took a while for me to get into this book. It's very slow going at the start and it isn't entirely clear which direction it's heading in. But once it got going I loved it. The characters, the mystery, the world, I enjoyed it all. As much as the pacing towards the beginning could've been moved a bit faster, I did like the fact that you get exposition and world building in little fragments throughout. It feeds into the idea of memories and broken history that's so important to the story.

The story itself is probably closest to the adventure genre, but it was very heavily influenced by the mystery element. I like when genre boundaries are broken like that - and Vic has a habit of it - because it stops things from being so predictable and ordinary. It's definitely Mac's story, and Mac's adventure through this strange new situation she finds herself in. The family drama side wasn't as enjoyable for me, but that's just preference. But all the while there's a murder mystery going on underneath to balance it off and elevate the events.

The Archived has a nice selection of characters. They definitely become more solid during the book itself, where they might have been shaky to begin with. As usual, the strength in Vic's characters are their relationships to one other. Two heads are stronger than one, but that isn't always the case in books where authors want their characters to be independent. But Vic knows how to make her protagonists capable on their own, while also having (and often needing) a little support on the side.

After a bit of a rocky start, I enjoyed The Archived a lot, and I look forward to reading the next book. In fact, I would do it right now if I didn't have an intimidating pile of other books to get through first.