Rachel Neumeier’s books are always a pleasure, taking you down the sort of rabbit hole that begs you to clutch a warm cup of tea while the story carries you away.
Like much of Neumeier’s work, The Mountain of Kept Memory feature two leads, brother and sister in this case, who take turns with the narrative. Men and women coexisting without a romantic subtext is always a welcome feature to me. Perhaps this is because I’ve always made friends easily with women. Or maybe I’ve just had enough with romance stories. I tend to roll my eyes when an adventure story introduces a love interest, because it invariably slows down the actual plot, but when men and women meet in a Neumeier story I have come to expect an interesting relationship.
Against a familiar backdrop (a medieval-esque fantasy world on the brink of war) we meet a pair of brave characters who turn out to be a lot of fun. Princess Oressa is a grown woman who enjoys sneaking around her father’s palace, climbing the outer walls, and eavesdropping on important meetings. (Exactly the sort of subtle trickery I would enjoy if I wasn’t a clumsy, 6’6″ monolith who couldn’t sneak past a cactus.) Shy Oressa turns out to be terribly clever, while her outspoken brother is a natural leader. They make quite a team.
The opening lines made me smile:
Oressa, curled beneath her father’s throne, her arms wrapped around her knees and her knees tucked up tight to her chest, was precariously hidden behind generous falls of the saffron-dyed silk draped over the seat and back of the throne. This sort of thing had been easier when she’d been twelve. Or even sixteen. Now that she was a woman grown, she had to work much harder to stay out of sight.
To save their country from war, Oressa and her brother explore the eponymous Mountain of Kept Memory to learn the secrets of the dead gods. They find, instead, a cache of ancient technology and a pile of confounding mysteries. The war grows more fierce while the mysteries deepen, forcing our pair of protagonists into a dangerous race for answers.
While the story is satisfyingly dramatic and exciting, it is also a lot of fun. I laughed at Oressa’s attempts to understand men, and felt a kind of sympathy with her brother when he realizes, once again, that his sister has found a new way to complicate his life. And I kept turning pages hoping to understand the ancient puzzle they had uncovered.
The calm reprieve provided by The Mountain of Kept Memory has been much appreciated. It seems I cannot get through five minutes of my day without enduring caustic, political rhetoric. I don’t know about you, but that kind of talk makes me weary, makes me want to leave the planet. This escapist adventure was exactly what I needed.