The Elusive Naermyth

As you may or may not know, I have been an active member of Goodreads since January 2015. If you're unfamiliar with Goodreads, it's essentially a way to keep up with the latest novels of your preferred genre, connect with friends to see what they're reading, discuss books with others, etc. It's awesome, and I update it almost daily. (If you click on any of the links in my book wrap-ups they take you to the respective book's Goodreads page, just fyi.) Goodreads will also recommend books to you based on what you've recently read, what you're currently reading, what you've liked in the past, and so on. (I have a bad habit of reading about those books and then adding them to my WTR, which is way out of control at this point.)

Well, back in July 2016 Goodreads recommended to me a book called Naermyth by Karen Francisco. It didn't have many ratings or reviews, but the synopsis was really intriguing and unique, so I went ahead and added it. After that I kind of left it for a while, as I do with most books I add to my WTR.

Fast-forward to about a half a year later. I don't remember exactly what it was that made me remember I'd added this book to my list; I think maybe when I was doing my end-of-year Goodreads cleanup I came across it in my WTR and was like "oh, yeah" and clicked on it again. This time I took a closer look at it as part of my cleanup process, and that's when I began to learn interesting things about it. Its setting was the Philippines. That's really different for a dystopian book nowadays - most of them take place in America or Europe. The story is essentially about all the creatures and monsters of legend turning out to actually exist and coming back to destroy the world and endanger the human population. Really different for a dystopian.

Then I noticed again that there weren't a lot of reviews on it. I began scrolling through the ones that were available and learned that many of them were written by Philippine people. I also saw in the questions section that someone had asked where you could buy the book online, because they couldn't find it anywhere.

Now that really intrigued me.

I began to do some digging of my own, clicking on all the links that Goodreads provides in terms of where to buy it, which libraries nearest you have it, etc. In a quest that ended up taking me about two months, I discovered that this book was not available for purchase online anywhere except for one site that was basically a Philippine Amazon. The thing about that? They did not ship internationally. It was Philippines only. This book was impossible to purchase unless you lived in its home country.

By now, obviously, I was becoming obsessed with being able to read it. The thrill of the chase was really hyping it up for me. So in one last ditch effort to see if I could get my hands on it, I clicked on the Libraries tab on the book's page. As it turns out, there are only three libraries across the entire United States that have a copy of Naermyth. Two of them are universities, and the third is the Library of Congress.

At this point it was early February of this year. If you don't know, I work at my local library at the circulation desk. One night when I went to work I sent an email to our Inter-Library Loans specialist asking if it was possible to request items that were out of state. (I'd already gotten a couple of in-state books through ILL in the time I'd worked there.) I told her there was a book I was trying to get my hands on that was being extremely elusive, but from what I'd researched it looked like there was a copy in the Library of Congress. When I went back to work the following evening, I'd gotten a reply. It was possible.

I went ahead and sent her the details, giving her the name of the book, the author, and how I'd learned which libraries in the country had it. She said she'd see what she could do. About a month went by and I hadn't heard anything more about it, so I sent her a follow-up email, to which she replied saying she'd already sent a request for the book to the Library of Congress but hadn't gotten a response. She told me she'd try again. About a week later she informed me that they'd given her the go-ahead to get the book from them, and on April 12, Naermyth was in my hands.

When you request a book from out of state like I did, many times the libraries have extra fees you need to pay or certain lending policies you have to follow. The awesome thing about getting Naermyth was that the library still only fined me the standard ILL fee of $2, but the catch was that it was an in-library use only item. Meaning I could not take it out of the library; I had to read it there. Good thing that's where I work!

Slowly, over the course of the past month, I read Naermyth while on shift whenever I had the opportunity. Sometimes we'd get slammed and I wouldn't get any reading done; other times it would be utterly dead and I'd get 30 pages read in one shift. The sprints varied and it took a while, but the point is, I was finally able to read the elusive Naermyth.

So now that you know the story of how I got it and how long it took to read it, let me tell you what I thought of it.

The first thing I noticed once I began was the writing itself. It read very much like many self-published books, meaning it was pretty poorly written and held no evidence of ever having been edited - by the author or anyone else. This kept up throughout the entire book. Some passages were worse than others; I noticed consistent tense changes (sometimes even in the same sentence) and misspellings. Weird word choices were also present, along with a lot of Philippine terminology that I didn't understand. The author relied very heavily on her readers being familiar with specifically Philippine monsters (which is fair, considering it is a self-published novel in that country). There were many passages that could have used more description and a lot of names I needed to keep up with, half of which weren't even important or only appeared once in the book. The author also used some cliches and overused plot devices while trying to portray them as being unexpected. Overall, there were just a lot of things wrong with the presentation of the story. An editor would have been extremely helpful in this area.

Despite all of these shortcomings, the story itself was actually really unique and well-paced; I ended up giving the book three stars. (It would have been four if the writing wasn't so bad.) Essentially, the plot follows a young woman named Athena who comes across a man during one of her missions who has no memories of the past five years, which is when the Naermyth (never myth) began crawling out of their hiding places and destroying the human way of life. It doesn't take long for her to learn that he is actually a Naermyth himself, and the two of them have a strange, inexpiable connection to one another. They go on a quest to uncover the mystery of who he is and why everything she's ever known is suddenly thrown into turmoil because of his arrival, and...that's basically all one should know going in.

I've read a handful of dystopian novels - enough to know that I don't really prefer the genre - but this is by far the most unique one I've read. The idea of creatures that we all thought were only myths coming back to disrupt everything is very different, and this author made it work in a fascinating way. The protagonist, Athena, is a main character that is unexpected in every sense of the word, but by the end of the novel I grew to really like her. Her journey with Dorian was a unique kind of quest, and all of the twists and turns involved throughout kept me guessing right up until the very last page. And speaking of endings, the author nailed the ending of Naermyth. It fit right along with the whole mood of the rest of the novel while still finishing on a hopeful note. All in all, despite the bad writing, the story itself was very unique and very good. It was well worth the hassle it took to get it in my hands.

I feel like if this author had gotten a good editor, Naermyth would be much bigger than it is now. Even if she'd hired a freelancer so it could still be self-published, a little fine tuning on the presentation would have made this novel stand out big time. I almost want to own a copy, because I would probably read this again. (Chances of that are slim, of course, but still. Plus it would be cool to have bragging rights.)

Now that it's all said and done, I think that the crazy chase Goodreads sent me on to read this book was well worth it in the end. Despite its being an in-library use only item, I still found the time to read and enjoy it. You can be sure I took plenty of notes, though; after all, it's not something I can just pick up and reference whenever I want to! I'll be kind of sad to send it back to the Library of Congress, but alas, its due date approaches. Naermyth, it's been fun. Thanks for introducing me to a dystopian world I'll never forget.