She spends much of the novel feeling very alone in a strange land, and so she doesn’t get to know her peers as well. I have said before that Dabos has a particular gift for world building, and I am so glad that she chose to expand the world of the Arks rather than perpetually confining us to the Pole-not that I don’t also love the Pole!Īlthough I did adore this book, I think the characters were less memorable this time around, although I do think it was partially due to Ophelia’s isolation. There we find an entirely new setting, filled with automatons and cold citizens who follow a strict dress code. She chooses to follow one of the leads she came across, and ends up on the Ark of Babel, where the Family Spirits Pollux and Helen reside, without her friends and in search of her husband. She longs to get away, but knows that she is ever under the watchful eye of the Doyennes.Īll that changes when Archibald, Fox, and Gail show up unexpectedly and Ophelia is whisked away from Anima.

Although she has been searching for clues about where Thorn might be-and where she can find out more about God-she has been stuck on Anima at her parents’ home ever since she was made to leave the Pole. We rejoin Ophelia two years and seven months after the events of The Missing of Clairdelune, selling pancakes at Anima’s Tickers Festival. Right from the start of this book we see Dabos’s high-powered imaginative world building at work. The rest of this review contains spoilers for the first two books, so if you haven’t read them yet, go do that and I’ll see you in my next post!

So far, I’ve found the first book, A Winter’s Promise, to be the weakest of the series, so if you tried that one and liked it alright but didn’t love it, I implore you to try the sequels, which are positively delightful (for reference, I rated the first book around a 3.5, and the second and third are both five-stars).

Christelle Dabos has created a totally unique world, blending imagery from both fantasy and sci-fi to create one of the few successful literary steampunk universes that I’ve encountered, and her world building doesn’t take away from memorable characters and action-packed plot. Seriously, if you haven’t picked up this series, you’re seriously missing out on some wonderfully inventive and refreshing fantasy. If you haven’t yet read A Winter’s Promise and The Missing of Clairdelune, stop reading and go to your library to borrow them or contact your local independent bookstore to order them right away-and go ahead and grab The Memory of Babel while you’re at it! The Memory of Babel is the third installment of Christelle Dabos’s The Mirror Visitor quartet (translated by Hildegarde Serle), and after a few months’ delay due to world events, is hitting U.S.

La Mémoire de Babel by Christelle Dabos