The Dork Review: Hapax

Can an entire universe be born out of just one word, a word that is never spoken again? According to K.T. Bryski's Hapax it can.

In fact, that's the central McGuffin of this book.

Oh don't worry. I'm not giving away any spoilers. It's all right there in the book's title. Hapax refers to Hapax legomenon a word that, according to Wikipedia "occurs only once within a context, either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text". So we know right from the beginning that words, or rather a Word, will play a vital role in the story.

And really, that's the core idea behind Miss Bryski's novel. Words matter, whether spoken or written, whether provided by a priest to give comfort or recorded for posterity and held in a library. They matter and they can bring either destruction or salvation.

Hapax starts from this base idea and crafts a world on the brink of ending unless the Word can be found and gives us characters we can care about; the compassionate priest, the orphan, the young magician, and the artificial girl learning to feel. All of them are archetypes but none of them are cardboard cutouts.

The book is also good for showing both sides of religious belief, the compassionate and the judgmental, the soft and the hard, the loving chaos and the harsh order. The forms the central conflict of Hapax, resonating throughout the novel, and affecting all of the characters.

K.T. has done a marvelous job with her first novel, and I look forward to see what else she can produce. Still, the book is not perfect. One quibble would be, it was too short. It felt as if the conflict was only really starting and then, bang, the book's done. Extending the length would also provide a chance to develop the villains a bit more. After finishing the book it felt as if they didn't get as much screentime as they could have.

Still, those minor bits aside this is a good book, well worth taking the time to read. Get in on the ground floor and start reading K.T. Bryski now so you can be all hipster and tell your friends you've been reading her for years before she hits it big.