I loved this book and was enthralled with the writing. I loved the character study. Would read more from the author!

The premise of this book was so intriguing to me but I think I wasn't in the right headspace when I read it. It was too metaphorical for me to get into. I did finish it but it was a slog. I'm sure that the reader it was written for will love it, but it didn't land for me.

This book was such a banger and had me hurrying through the day to get to my evening reading time! The worldbuilding is so fascinating! The ways that new words are first divined and then delivered, almost like a birth; the governance and bureaucracy that grows up alongside that process, and the ways ordinary people find to push against or exist outside that bureaucracy; the recognizable remnants of stories from before the Silence, and the way words and stories as art can be both a means of subjugating people and a means of resistance. And the ghosts! The ghosts, who are believed to have no emotions or memories of their lives and believed to feel no pain, who are enslaved for free labor and used as literal fuel. Deeply painful. And the trains!!!!! The Number Twelve, where the courier, our protagonist, lives and works, and the train of the Black Square traveling show. It's all so specific and intriguing, part Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play and part Infinity Train.

All this captivating setup leads the reader into a really classic, but uniquely done, fantasy journey a la The Wizard of Oz, a motley crew of companions and unusual side characters and interesting antagonists, and a final confrontation that literally changes the world. I loved what this book had to say about systems of oppression, and morality, and art, and individual expression, and personhood. I loved the drawn-out denouement like the many endings of Return of the King. I loved the little bits of comforting queer romance that didn't get in the way of anybody doing what they needed and wanted to do, and loved the deep platonic and familial relationships driving the story.

The Naming Song tries to pull you into a world in which meaning is often delivered by courier, where nameless things can grow wild and strange, and what goes unspoken can take on a life of its own. On almost all fronts, this book succeeds wildly. Our protagonist is a nameless courier whose job requires them to literally bring descriptive meaning to people across the world (which has been rocked by a calamity), and their unique perspective as both an outsider and insider into this fundamental role of their society is fascinating.

Unfortunately, the slow style of worldbuilding that is being put to use here can hurt the pacing, with the start being difficult to get through as while the reader is learning things it felt as if not much was happening. When things pick up later in the plot and things go more or less off the rails, this stops being an issue for me, and the journey is well worth it.

The Naming Song is such a thrilling and uniquely interesting ride through a world where things have lost their names and there is a certain magic and power in divining and delivering these names. It is a captivating read that beautifully blends whimsy with deeper themes.

The often lyrical prose will draw you into a world where names hold immense power and meaning, creating a rich tapestry of characters and emotions. Even with characters having names such as “Book” and “Rope,” I felt that these characters had more depth and history driving their motivations than characters in so many other books that I have read.
I loved how the story explores identity and the significance of names in shaping our destinies. Berry’s imaginative storytelling and vivid descriptions make every scene come alive. While the pacing may slow down in a few places, the narrative flows effortlessly and the overall journey is enchanting and well worth it, all the way to the end of the line.
The audiobook certainly added to the enchanting and lyrical experience, immersing you into the world and the delivery of names from page one. I easily got lost in this story. This is one that will definitely linger with me for a while.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
Thank you so, so much to @torbooks for the ARC and @macmillan.audio for the ALC. All thoughts are my own.

There are parts of The Naming Song that I loved. The beginning introducing the system of delivery of words is unique, poetic, and beautiful. Two, Book, and the stowaway are brilliant characters I enjoyed immediately. The story of Hand and Moon is the stuff of myth and Shadow. I loved so much of this, and yet it took me nearly three months to get through reading. The introduction is beautifully written, yes, but also incredibly disorienting. It took me to 40% through to be able to understand the basics. What are monsters? What are ghosts? Who are the sayers?! The difficulty with world-building made reading much less enjoyable than I wanted it to be, and the rest of the novel has ups (Black Square everything) and downs (so much traveling) in that regard. I am happy I finished this book, but I'm also relieved. I wish this ended about 7% sooner than it did as well, and that's because this book felt a bit drawn out.
I listened to the audio and switched between the ebook and audiobook frequently to try to better understand the story. The audiobook narrator has a beautiful lilting voice, but she spoke very fast and did not help my understanding of the story as I often found myself zoning out the audio, which is unusual for me.
This may come across negatively overall, but in fact, there were parts of this story that will stay with me for a long while still. I truly did enjoy it once I was situated within the context of this strange place of magic and make believe after the Silence.
Thanks to NetGalley, Tor, and Macmillan Audio for this ARC!

It’s for the reader who wants literary fantasy or for the literary fiction reader who doesn’t mind fantasy elements. As the summaries say, words went away and monsters crept into the world. The Named Committee is finding the words for everything again and basically trying to hold, the world together with the magic of language. I found the characters shallow and didn’t care too much about any of them but it’s a book more about the set and the writing. For the right read this might be a four star book. For a reader who just wants a straight up fantasy this is not going to be the title. I would recommend them. But for someone who wants some more literary this could be a good choice.

The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry is an intriguing, engaging journey of enigmas, as much of this world has been an enigma to its inhabitants. Some kind of cataclysmic trauma has struck the world with collective amnesia, or transformed it beyond recognition, so that the words for all things have been lost. Now, diviners of the Names committee dream up words for people, objects, activities, and other concepts, and couriers deliver these Names; in so doing, they define and solidify the Named.

The Named find it difficult to clearly perceive the nameless and their ways. So the only courier who is nameless, who is the protagonist of this book, is unique, merely tolerated for her utility under the protection of Book, the chair of the names committee. She rides the Number 12 train and delivers words to people in towns along the route.

“She delivered stowaway. … The watchers were happy to have a word for those people. Easier to catch them that way.”

There are also Sayers who say the laws that the Named must follow, and there is a Deletion Committee who decide when words are no longer appropriate, and must be unnamed; this includes Names of people, who are never seen again after that.

Not all welcome this shaping of the world through defining it with names. The nameless, including people and monsters, have been attacking the Named – or is it the other way around? War is brewing.

Meanwhile, the unnamed courier is lonely, missing her long-absent sister, so she finds companionship with a patchwork ghost who draws and keeps records, with a small, furry beast who drops in on her occasionally, and with her lover, a diviner named Beryl. But some time after she is attacked by a group of masked nameless people, and barely makes it back to the train, she is joined by a new companion: a monster who resembles her sister.

The courier herself is put under investigation and flees. She and some of her companions join the Black Square Show, a traveling troupe of players who reenact the stories of how the world was made, and she keeps getting into trouble and finding out things. Eventually, that war that has been brewing comes to a head, and she has to choose sides.

I loved this book. It’s very much its own thing, but it reminded me of some great books I’ve read (see below).

The third-person prose is fairly simple and direct, even when describing the nebulous, but it expresses complex concepts well, as the courier begins to understand more and more of the world, its history, and the forces that move it. This helps make the courier very easy to empathize with in her questionings and evolution.

I really enjoyed following the courier’s journey in this book, both physical and mental, through mysteries, through self-knowledge and growth, and through understanding of her world. It has interesting ideas, and it’s a really good read.

The Naming Song will be released Tuesday, Sept. 24, and can be preordered here. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250907981/thenamingsong

Content warnings: Violence, death, oppression, memories of childhood trauma. Also, there are some fairly horrific concepts in this book, such as calibration, what’s done to ghosts so that they become obedient servants, and even worse things that are done to ghosts and monsters. But it’s not a horror novel; it’s an adventure of travel and mysteries.

Comps:
Wheel of the Infinite, by Martha Wells: the traveling troupe, the puppet, and the regular redrawing and renewal of the world
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin: having power over someone or something by knowing its true name
Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee: Calendrical redefinitions of reality

4.5 / 5 stars

The Naming Song is a beautifully written fantasy set in a unique dystopia where all language was lost and must be found again. The narrative follows an unnamed courier who is tasked with delivering newly divined words out to the world. However, she find herself fleeing the life she knows when she is caught up in a plot of betrayal and monstrous attacks. Accompanied by a ghost, a monster of her own making, and a mysterious stowaway creature, the courier sets out to find her long-lost sister, who may have the answers she is seeking.

Reading this book brought to mind so many other wonderful fantasies, and I suspect that the author has incorporated them intentionally. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz are specifically called out by the narrative. (But not named, because those names have been lost.) The dreamlike, not fully explained world with its conflicts between ghosts and war machines feels very much like a Studio Ghibli film (Howl's Moving Castle particularly comes to mind). The monster Oh, which is part train, part cat, and part dragon, would be right at home alongside Totoro's famous Catbus. The importance of words and of naming things felt akin to The Wizard of Earthsea. The roving band of performers seeking to restore history to a fallen world with their plays brought to mind Station Eleven. Living one's entire life on a moving train after disaster reminded me of Snowpiercer. The narrative plays with all of our previously conceived notions of a dystopian tale and creates something I found unique and lovely.

The story did feel perhaps a bit on the long side, which is why I can't quite give it five stars. The world-building is excellent and I could immerse myself in this version of my world following a horrible disaster. But a bit of trimming on the exposition and setting could have kept things moving a bit more briskly.

This book is an excellent choice for anyone who loves the Studio Ghibli films and has longed for a novel-version of their aesthetic. This is perhaps one of the most beautiful books that I have read this year and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

This review will be posted to Goodreads and Instagram (@goodquietkitty) on September 21, 2o24.

“A gorgeously imaginative fantasy in the spirit of Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo del Toro.”

They pulled me in with the Miyazaki comp, and I can definitely see where they were coming from. It has an absurd but tranquil quality to the world and the magic that had me mentally shelving it next to any number of Studio Ghibli films.

It’s beautifully written. I knew it was going to be a 5 star read by the end of the first paragraph.

But be prepared to not have a clear understanding of the world or magic system for the first bit. I was mystified but absolutely transfixed as everything slowly took shape.

Thanks to Tor for providing an advanced digital copy for me to review!

Absolutely worth the slightly slow start, The Naming Song is a fascinating blend of genres and subtypes. While certainly not the first novel to address a confluence of questions regarding language and authoritarianism arising after an apocalyptic event, Jebediah Berry’s novel approaches the questions crookedly (like the unnamed animal stowaway you’ll meet should you choose to read this novel). The blend of magic, politics, humanity, occasional humor, and of course, the importance of language—what is named and what is unnamed—makes this worth picking up. But it’s what makes it worth continuing and finishing that is the real accomplishment. Not only is The Naming Song entertaining and enjoyable, not only does it ask some big questions, it asks questions of almost everything. Everything that the protagonist and other characters believe to be true is brought into question and must be examined. In this way, it is also an excellent reminder of how important it is to examine our assumptions, to interrogate our preconceptions and to be open to new ways of seeing the world around us. Read the book. You’ll understand what I mean.

Thanks to Netgalley and Tor for providing me with an advance review copy of this novel. My thoughts and opinions are my own.

DNF at 60%. Amazing premise that fell flat, not helped by very plodding prose. The story got bogged down in all these things that were mind-numbingly dull, and I never felt any sense of wonder at the strangeness - it was like Berry worked hard to make all the strange ideas and things mundane, squeezing all the juice out of them. And almost nothing HAPPENED - I would have been happy to read a huge book of gorgeous prose or great vibes, I don't need a lot of plot, but the writing was actively sleep-inducing and there were no vibes at all, so the lack of plot? Taking 50 pages to cover almost nothing? Major problem.

The reveal about the origin of the Sayers was so underwhelming - who cares??? This is only a LE GASP moment if you think people who work with trash are somehow lesser than the rest of us, which was never baked into the worldbuilding, so it made no sense for everyone to be all shock-horror.

No idea where the story's going - at 60%! - and could not care less.

"A gorgeously imaginative fantasy in the spirit of Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo del Toro.

There's nothing more dangerous than an unnamed thing.

When the words went away, the world changed.

All meaning was lost, and every border fell. Monsters slipped from dreams to haunt the waking while ghosts wandered the land in futile reveries. Only with the rise of the committees of the named - Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names - could the people stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. They built borders around their world and within their minds, shackled ghosts and hunted monsters, and went to war against the unknown.

For one unnamed courier of the Names Committee, the task of delivering new words preserves her place in a world that fears her. But after a series of monstrous attacks on the named, she is forced to flee her committee and seek her long-lost sister. Accompanied by a patchwork ghost, a fretful monster, and a nameless animal who prowls the shadows, her search for the truth of her past opens the door to a revolutionary future - for the words she carries will reshape the world.

The Naming Song is a book of deep secrets and marvelous discoveries, strange adventures and dangerous truths. It's the story of a world locked in a battle over meaning. Most of all, it's the perfect fantasy for anyone who's ever dreamed of a stranger, freer, more magical world."

The power of names, of language, is the greatest power of all.

The Naming Song by Jedediah Berry is an extraordinary, magical novel about the power of names and the power of being unnamed. This unique story captured my imagination, kept me deeply engrossed until the end, and left me wanting more. The story is all about words and names, yet I have been unable to find the perfect words to express how much I loved this novel. The Naming Song is full of magic, whimsy, intrigue, and danger. It is written with a deep intelligence that can weave together the many threads and ideas in the novel. The Naming Song is a book that defies classification in the best way possible; it manages to be many things and simultaneously a complete whole. I loved this novel and will recommend it to anyone!

• set in a fantasy world that entirely revolves around the power that names & language give to objects, people, & ideas
• beautiful language & descriptions accompany the adventure the narrator must embark on
• the structure of the book is as important as what the book says
• if you liked ‘the starless sea,’ you’ll enjoy this one

The Naming Song, by Jebediah Berry, is an ambitious work with a thoughtful and thought-provoking premise, and if (for me at least), it didn’t fully carry through on that ambition or premise, I’ve got to give credit to Berry for the reach. Certainly, given both that ambition and the level of writing here, I’ll look forward to what comes next from them (and also check out some prior work).

The story is set in world that developed after a great cataclysm that seemingly erased all language (amongst more tangible losses; the world is filled with ruins), such that there is the Named and the Nameless, whether we’re talking places or people, objects or concepts. “Diviners” somehow ascertain a word, and then Couriers “deliver” the word to the people:

Before a word could be spoken aloud by others, a courier had to speak it first. And to speak a new word, the courier had to know the thing it names. Had to hold it in mind like a perfect glass bead, had to become that bead — and then had to break it.

The delivery makes the Named thing/concept/person “real” and grounded to the world in ways it was not when it was unnamed. In towns, for instance, there are nameless places that are difficult if not impossible to see even though they lie just a few yards away. This is also a world full of ghosts — who do not talk but can work can also be burned for fuel for machines — and “monsters”, created from the detritus of dreams. And it’s a world in conflict, not too far removed from a horrific war between the Named and the Nameless, the repetition of which seems closer and closer to becoming reality as more acts of violence and terror occur. Finally, it’s a world built on story, particularly the story of Hand and Moon, the first and second Namer respectively.

Our protagonist is a Courier (having never been named for reasons explained in the novel, she is known only as “the Courier”) whose home is with the rest of the Names Committee aboard the Number Twelve train. There, diviners divine and then her boss, Book, gives her an envelope with whatever new word they’ve come up with, and she goes to deliver it. Early on, the Courier’s main goal is to make contact with her sister Ticket, who left home years ago when both were young. Soon though, she finds herself entangled in the political machinations of an authoritarian-wannabe Committee head, in the conflict between the Named and the Nameless, in a potential rebellion against the current hierarchical system of governance.

I absolutely loved this premise of rebuilding language one word at a time, the idea of names calling into being the things they name (somewhat similar to the classic LeGuin usage in her EARTHSEA series). And I loved the stylistic fashion we are introduced to the concept early on, with paragraphs beginning with lines like “She delivered echo . . . She delivered stowaway … She delivered brass … She delivered moth … She delivered harrow. Each opening line followed by an explanatory vignetter: “She delivered float She lay face up in water and let her legs dangle . . . She spoke the word, swam ashore, and put her clothes on. Float, floating, floats. Once the word was delivered, anyone could speak it, or change it a little to suit what they needed to say. She floated. We saw her floating.”

It's true that as much as I loved the concept and its, well, delivery, it doesn’t stand to think too much about how this all works in a day-to-day pragmatic sense, or how the diviners come up with words, or a host of other little niggling details that if you focus on could derail the whole thing. And so Berry has an almost dreamlike approach here, a sort of mistiness that hovers over things and lets the reader sort of slide through it all. Which I find both smart and effective. At least for much of the novel. Once we start getting into a more grounded storyline that mistiness wasn’t quite so useful, and particularly in the latter stages where elements of logistics and scale come into play, it was downright frustrating.

In fact, while the plot twists and scenes of action and tension and mostly well executed throughout the more “normal” kind of plot, I find myself bemoaning we’d gone down that road, as it all felt familiar and sometimes predicable (the wannabe dictator, plucky band of rebels on the run, big battle scenes, etc.) and something that even if done mostly well felt like a bit of a letdown after the early part of the story with its monsters and ghosts and Named/Nameless. I’m not sure one could have sustained that misty, surreal storyline over a novel (and honestly, even with the more traditional plotting this one felt a bit over-long), but I would have loved to have seen a novella or long short story that left out much of that traditional storyline.

Though of course, that’s me complaining the author wrote the novel they wanted to write and not the one I wanted to read, which has its own issues obviously. So addressing the novel Berry did write, the usage of both the ghosts and monsters was wonderful, often original, and at times quite moving. While I felt the world’s monomyth of Hand and Moon was a bit predicable in the final revelation, the presentation and evocation of it throughout was nicely atmospheric and felt both true to this world and wholly embedded within it. The prose is varied and sharply calibrated to its purpose, clear when necessary and lovely at lyrical at other times.

Characters are a bit hit and miss for me. The Courier is a strongly realized character, and her growth throughout as she finds her way in this world was a pleasure to follow. The speaking characters, with the exception of one or two like Book, were less fully developed and engaging, and the romance felt a bit perfunctory. My two favorite characters, and the ones I most engaged with emotionally, were the two who did not speak: one the Patchwork Ghost that has been with the Courier for most of her life and the other a monster she accidentally creates. Finally, as noted, the book did feel its length, bogging down in the latter parts somewhat so that I was a bit impatient, especially to get through the battle scenes, which felt repetitive. On the other hand, the post-battle, almost an epilogue-like close, won me back over even if I wished it had come sooner.

In the end, I was thrilled with the premise, loved the early parts for that premise and the author’s style, mostly enjoyed the rest even if a bit disappointed at the track it went down and a bit impatient with the pacing/length, and certainly was happy I’d read it. Recommended.

This was an interesting book that I neither disliked or liked. I have very mixed feelings about it to be truthful. It has a very interesting premise, an interesting main character, and the main story was complex enough to keep me going to the end. But I often found my mind wandering off as I was reading, and then I would have to reread the last paragraph or so because it just didn’t stick. I think this was mainly due to the pacing which was slow, and the writing style.

The first 50 pages were the hardest, getting into this world was difficult. Language, or at least some of the words for things had been lost, so it would take many words to say something simple. The character names also took a bit of getting used to, as they were often named for common things, like Ticket, Books, and Shadow, and those names didn’t coordinate with who they were or their jobs. So it did take me awhile to get it all sorted. The world building itself was adequate, things were described well enough, but I also felt that things weren’t explained well enough either.

The story is told from the unnamed courier, who was just referred to as ‘the courier’. She was a very interesting character and her growth over the course of the book was tremendous. She starts off as a pawn in the events that evolved around her into a leader that pretty much changes the course of her culture. I really did like her quite a bit and I think it was her more than anything else that kept me interested in the story.

There were many themes throughout the story but the one that intrigued me the most was how language and words evolved. Basically all languages are made up, humans put different sounds together and assigned these sounds to the things around them. The courier’s job in this story was to introduce new words to the world. It is more complicated than this, but it was an interesting look at language development.

I think there will be a lot of people who will love this book. It certainly has a good story behind it and a very complex and interesting world. It just unfortunately never really worked for me. But if you enjoy complex diverse worlds with an interesting main character, than this is one that I think you should give a chance.

Wow! This book was so fascinating. I was immediately gripped by the world building. It was a little hard to orient myself at first, but it was well worth it. The concepts were so original and unlike any fantasy book I have read. I can’t wait to tell everyone I know about it! I recommend this book to scifi and fantasy readers looking for a standalone adventure.

This was such an interesting concept, and the execution was really well done. I enjoyed the slow worldbuilding, and the way that words were slowly brought into being and then as their meaning took shape they way they fit into the story did as well.

All words are made up. Some words—like a lol that you actually pronounce instead of just laughing out loud—are more made up than others. But in the world of Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, words have to be divined and delivered by officials. Generations ago the something fell from the something tree and the Silence wiped out all of the words from before. Our protagonist delivers words where they are needed (she famously delivered the word “trouble.”) and life rolls along just like the naphtha-powered train the diviners, namers, and others use to get from here to there. That is, it rolls along until our narrator has a couple of near-fatal meetings with the nameless and a conspiracy begins to appear.

The world Berry describes in The Naming Song strikes me as dusty, featureless, and mostly empty. But when the namers visit and deliver a new word, it feels like another color pops into existence or something unsee comes into clarity. It’s as if the entire world has the feeling of a word they once knew constantly at the tip of their tongues. It’s a relief when people like our protagonist come through and pronounce a new noun, verb, adjective, etc. Our protagonist’s deepest wish is to someday deliver a border word, a word that can reshape the world like light, dark, day, or night. For those readers who are linguistically inclined, the entire premise is a fascinating opportunity to muse on how words are coined or language began in the first place. But then Berry gives us so many other things to puzzle out: what’s up with all the ghosts? How do the diviners figure out the right word for something? How do you embody a shadow enough to name it? Why couldn’t they have come up with a better word than “monster” for the beings people can dream up?

I can’t summarize The Naming Song, even in part like I usually do, because this is the kind of novel you have to just dive into and trust that the characters, plot, and setting will carry you to an amazing ending. If I try to explain things instead of slowly revealing them the way Berry does with his intelligent, subtle prose, everything will sound odd. Also, I might accidentally spoil something. Instead, I will simply say that there are so many things I love about this delightfully weird story. The nameless courier is brave, clever, and curious—everything I want in a protagonist. There are multiple layers of conspiracy and cross-purposes for me to dig through alongside her. Then there are all those questions I just mentioned to muse on later. This book also features some incredible showdowns, betrayals, sacrifices, and rescues throughout the plot. This book shines with imagination and, as soon as I finished the last page, I had to just stare off into space to collect myself because The Naming Song utterly transported me.