Beatriz In The Infinite Library: An Offworld Adventure

by Bridget Smith

Overview

When Beatriz and Iris step through a hidden portal their world is forever changed.

A far-distant world terrorized by an oppressive regime.

An indigenous people who change gender at will.

And a test of this new world's strength in the face of evil.

College students Beatriz and Iris are just starting a summer internship at a Middle East archaeology museum when they stumble on a hidden portal leading them to the mythical world of Tlön.

Will they be able to help defeat the cruel tyrants who aspire to infinite power by controlling the Infinite Library?

One step in the wrong direction could spell disaster.

This metaverse fantasy will not only transport you but keep you on the edge of your seat with unexpected twists at every turn. Take a trip to the Infinite Library.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578294766
Publisher:	ICS Media
Publication date:	06/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	218
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Bridget Smith was born Gordon Smith. She was raised in a rural Republican farm town in upstate New York and, viewed from the great remove of age, sees it as having been an idyllic upbringing, very close to the natural world of butterflies, trees, pond-life, snakes, and dogs. Her father gave her and her sister the great gift of reading aloud to them almost every night, stories by C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, and Conan Doyle, among others. Around age fifty, she acknowledged that the life she had led as a man up until that point was an increasingly unendurable sham and in 2006 she came over from the Dark Side (no offense, gents). Her transition from male to female was remarkably smooth, to her great relief, with friends and family almost universally supporting her. The transition from painting to writing has also been a pleasant surprise.

Escaping the politics and confines of the small town of Eden, she graduated from Antioch College with a BS in Painting and Organic Chemistry and fought fires with the volunteer fire department on campus and in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Moving to San Francisco after graduation brought about a reorientation of her life, which led to marriage, parenthood, and a career in graphic design.

Great works of literature continued to be an uplifting experience, with works by Nabokov, Borges, Calvino, and Tolstoy at the top of the list, and her painting gave way to writing. Her young adult fantasy novel The Forest in the Hallway was published in 2006 by Clarion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Her new book, published in 2022, is Beatriz in the Infinite Library, which is to a degree informed by the authors transition to a female life.

She lives happily in San Francisco with a satisfying circle of friends and relatives (who are kind enough to laugh at her jokes), her partner Rae, their cats Pyewacket, Xenia, and Luna.

Editorial Reviews

2022-11-02
Two students using a magical artifact teleport to a fantasy realm—straight out of the pages of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges—here the author is alive and imprisoned in a remarkable library.

Smith offers a YA fantasy starring the same lead as her debut novel, The Forest in the Hallway (2006). Beatriz has a talent for stumbling into alternative-reality realms and figuring out their riddles. Now a college student, Beatriz and her moth-studying best friend, Iris, have embarked on summer internships and studies overseas in the Middle Eastern nation of Uqbar. The country intrigues Beatriz because it puts her in the vicinity of the miragelike realm of Tlön, a land (or indeed a whole other planet) from the writings of her favorite author, Borges. Beatriz “had discovered his Labyrinthsduring her first year at Huxley College for Women, and he was an inspiration for her choice of Uqbar as a place to study abroad.” After many foreboding warnings that Tlön is not real, that the inhabitants are unfriendly, and that only a few people go there, the young women are informed by Professor Ptolemy that a museum relic—a decorative glove—can teleport them, somewhat haphazardly, to the realm. But the place is in a state of crisis. Foreign invaders—oddly dubbed the North Americans—have rolled in with military hardware and massive numbers. They want to get their greedy hands on a fantastic Tlön resource: a largely subterranean library (from the Borges story “The Library of Babel”) that theoretically contains every book ever written and thus, much dangerous and powerful knowledge. Moreover, via visions, Beatriz knows that Borges himself (though he died in 1986) is held captive in the library in a ruthless bid by the North Americans to solve the mystery of the institution’s organization. There appears to be no card catalog. Needless to say, the engrossing text is fecund with literary and pop-culture references, as might be expected from material drawn from a Borges story cycle. There is dream logic of a kind that interweaves with quantum physics and is its own source of surrealism. Even nice, blind Borges cannot offer an explanation of how he came to be trapped in a solid construct of his own imagination (though some outside scholarship by readers will uncover that this is a classic Borges-ian dilemma). Smith does not write a condescending fairy tale for a school-age demographic. Even when wild animals help Beatriz, they remain, thankfully, largely inscrutable and non-English speakers (take that, Harry Potter). Curiously, the North Americans evoke little sense of danger and are routed by Tlön mysticism. The storied Tlön itself feels like a strange hybrid of the Westernized mundane (computer users and restaurant workers going about their daily business) and Through the Looking Glass fantastical. The most distinctive feature is a Tlön subculture of Lake People who change their genders at will—which evidently gives the North American interlopers the willies. (The author’s name was Gordon Smith when the first book was published, and she has since transitioned.) Beatriz even muses about the adventuresome sexual possibilities with her main Lake Person ally, but in between trying to rescue Borges and fix a few alt-universes, the college student remains chaste.

A curious and engaging LGTBQ+–friendly narrative of metafictional fantasy and offbeat whimsy.

Kirkus Reviews