Our Discussion of Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft

Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel #1) by Josiah Bancroft

The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel in the world. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of airships and steam engines, of unusual animals and mysterious machines.

Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants.

Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the long guns of a flying fortress. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure.

Below are a sampling of our comments:

• There were dirigibles/balloons/airships!
• I cared most about Marya – we got some backstory, but what happened to her?
• It was rude to leave us hanging like that!
• Because Senlin has no idea what is going on, we don’t either
• Senlin figured out the purpose of the beer-me-go-round and the fires in the Parlor – I would have liked more explanations of things in the Tower instead of so many loose ends.
• I enjoyed it – it’s the first book of the series, so the loose ends are okay. I didn’t take it too seriously.
• The mirror technology to get light into the Baths was like in The Mummy – the walls of the Tower were half a mile thick
• Each floor was interesting and the Parlor was insane. Why not just hire people to stoke the fires?
• I liked the different levels of the Tower – it was interesting and picked up as it went along
• The guide Senlin relied on was written to lure people to the Tower to exploit them
• I gave up on it at the end of Part 1 due to arbitrary cruelty, and that although Marya was much more interesting than Senlin, she was treated as a McGuffin
• Women had no agency in this world until the very end when Edith returned
• We were buried in detail of this fantastic world, but the character development wasn’t great
• This book was different from anything else we’ve read – full of imagination and description. The book is about Senlin and not his wife, other than that she is the point of the quest
• This was Senlin’s coming of age story where he was on a mission, made friends, and developed guile

Please add any additional thoughts or comments you have about Senlin Ascends. We gave this title the codes STP, AGE, UTP, DRG, HRO, MYT, ALL, QUE & CAP with an average rating of 3.25.