Review of Lexicon

Lexicon
By Max Berry

3 Stars – I really wanted to like this book. I really did. I was so excited when I found it at the bookstore. It is a Time magazine top 10 fiction book of the year, a NPR best book of the year and... had rave reviews; including one from one of my favorite authors describing it as “A masterpiece.” So what went wrong? “Lexicon” had such potential yet it took me over a week to get through this book. A week! I brought this book with me to the beach so at just under 400 pages I should have gotten through this in 3 days… tops. I think the last time it took me a week to get through a book I was reading “Under the Dome” which is almost 1100 pages. The truth is that it was a real struggle to even finish this book, but I wanted to give it a fair shake and read to the end.

“Lexicon” follows two characters, Wil (an Australian who is abducted at an airport) and Emily (a homeless girl who is given an invite to attend a very elite school), and their intermingling stories. At the beginning of the story Emily is a con-artist who is skilled in the art of “slight-of-hand card games”. The school (a nameless organization) takes notice of Emily’s talents and extends an invite. The reason they are so intrigued by her is that unlike other schools, which teach math and science, this school is only interested in language… and more specifically how to use it to persuade others. Because of these abilities the graduates of the school are called “Poets”. As you progress in the story you learn that some of these Poets have gone rogue so the organization is in need of an outlier (someone who cannot be persuaded by words). Enter Wil. Wil has no knowledge of this organization or that such people exist, or that he even is an “outlier”, but he is the key both sides of the Poet Wars need. As Emily and Wil’s two worlds converge you finally discover all the shocking secrets and hidden powers behind this elite mysterious organization.

The idea behind this story is as titillating as it is original. I have read books where certain characters have a great power of persuasion, and this occurs in real life (can anyone say “Jim Jones”?), but it’s never been expounded upon in this way. It is not a single individual that is using his words of persuasion but instead an entire organization. Can you imagine the possibilities? You could convince anyone of quite literally anything. So, the 3 stars I gave “Lexicon” is solely from this awesome concept. But then you actually start reading the book. It might have been better if it hadn’t skipped around so much. First you are reading Emily’s story which takes place when she is 16, then you are reading Wil’s story current day, skip forward to Emily in the future, backwards to Wil in the past…. Sooooo confusing. Then the end just got sloppy, like Berry was trying to just wrap it up. One paragraph you are reading that Emily was given a choice to make (but she never states what her decision is) then you turn the page and it has flipped forward a few months and she is acting upon her decision. And then the very end… so corny. Regardless to say, I was not very impressed with this book and don’t see what all the hype was about. If you really want to read it for yourself I suggest buying it used off Amazon


~Laura