New Book Review: The Crystalline Crucible

Title: The Crystalline Crucible 

Author: Adam Rowan

Date: 2024

Publisher: Spinning Monkey

Length: 331 pages

Quote: "" I knew perfectly well who you were when I got your application. What I didn’t know then was that in hiring you I would be employing quite possibly the worst employee in the history of—” This sentence isn’t going to end well. “—England.” Oh, good! Much better than the world." 

Max is "neurodivergent, but that doesn't mean...insane," as he tells someone during a quarrel. He's reacted to bullying about being nerdly by amping up his nerdliness to the point of self-parody. He's not a typical case of Aspergers Syndrome, if he has it; he has friends, has basically normal "feelings," cares about causes, but brandishes his eccentricities like a flag. His kind of eccentric intelligence specializes in memorizing trivia. He's memorized all the laws of England, though at the beginning of this novel he's in the process of breaking several of them. He thinks stealing a mammoth's tusk from a museum is acceptable because he's participating in a treasure hunt game to raise money to keep the local library open. Only after he's been bailed out and left the police station does it occur to him that going to the treasure hunt web site and finding a picture of the mammoth's tusk might be the way to find the next clue.

Although he cares about the library, and Sofia, the librarian, and Rosie, his old school friend, and Kiddy Winks, the preschool where she's officially a math teacher though the children "can barely count," and Ms Johnson, the manager of the store where he's the worst employee, and the children at the orphans' home where he spent his teen years, Max does not usually like other young men. So he doesn't like Rosie's boyfriend Brad (it's mutual; they don't like to admit it's jealousy), or Khalil, the criminal gang's "mule" who comes to work at the store. Nevertheless, his efforts to raise money for the library by winning quiz shows and hunting treasure make both of them his teammates. Although he says at the outset that "the enemies to friends trope" isn't going to work for him, it is. As the treasure hunt, the quiz show competition, and the gang's activities heat up, they'll save each other's lives at their own risk.

Khalil is Afghan, not Pakistani (as some people guess), and is nicely portrayed as an example of how family and culture can partly compensate for the internal conscience extroverts lack. Though we see him committing thousands of pounds' worth of property crimes at the beginning of the story, that's only because he feels helpless to resist the gang who are exploiting him. Given friends and a way to pay for what he's stolen, he's capable of acting honorably. 

What this team find on their treasure hunt is...heartwarming, in the end, but with comedy-movie-type action, including a car chase and a few explosions, along the way. Max has made a conscious choice to make almost everything he says a snarky one-line joke, and other one-line jokes abound. I laughed out loud, on average about once per chapter. 

This is the kind of book people do book reviews for. We wade through a lot of fiction (and I prefer nonfiction anyway). We find ourselves allowing four stars if a mystery was believable but not dead obvious, a romance didn't make us feel that the heroine needed spaying, or a comedy made us smile, because yes we have read a lot of fiction that was worse; four stars means above average. Then there are the books that make us think, "This is well above average. This is a book I'd buy printed copies of to give to friends as a birthday present. This is a book I'm going to see other people raving about, in the next two or three years, and I'll be gloating, 'I saw it first.'" If five stars are what we give Milton or Shakespeare or at least Ruth Ozeki, well...right. 4.8 stars here. The author is young and may write five-star books some day.

Anybody who likes comedy will like this book; it would make a good movie. I received an advance readers' copy in time to post advance reviews on Goodreads, Library Thing, and Book Sirens. Officially finished, printed copies should start appearing in stores today. If you like this web site, you like snarky nerds, so you'll want to order a copy.