The Library at Mount Char – Scott Hawkins

Remarkable book! Very different, somewhat dark.

Carolyn and eleven others are students of the man they call ‘Father’. The relationship was not voluntary. On the day their parents died, he simply informed the twelve then-young-children that they were now his students/apprentices. Since then they’ve been been in the Library (very-capital-L!). Father’s pedagogical approach is not kind. Since he has the knowledge needed to cure any damage done to the children, he sees no reason to spare the rod - or the whip or the knife.

Father may as well be God. We are explicitly assured that he isn’t, just as we are explicitly assured that there is no such thing as magic, but Clarke’s Law applies. You name it, he can do it. And now he’s missing-presumed-dead.

David is another of the students. His field of study was mayhem. (The Library was divided into twelve parts. No student was permitted to study outside the part assigned to that student.) David can kill or maim any or all of the other eleven - and he’s mad enough and sadistic enough that he might. Or he might simply dominate the others until he figures out how to take over the Library, at which point David might as well be God. But Carolyn has a plan.