The List

Patricia Forde's The List is a quiet, chilling book for 10 year olds set in a city where you are allowed five hundred words and no more.

What happens

Letta is apprentice to Benjamin, the wordsmith of Ark. Her days are spent copying words onto small square cards in her own careful hand, sorting them into boxes, one box per child, ready for the start of school.

She is very good at it, and she loves it, and she has no idea yet what she is helping to build.

While she is making tea, a gavver arrives. The gavvers keep order in Ark and they speak only in the permitted vocabulary, in short flat bursts that Letta cannot stand to listen to.

He has brought an instruction. The permitted list is coming down from seven hundred words to five hundred.

Letta hands him his cup and tells him it's burdock tea. He leans in very close and corrects her. Tea. Burdock is not on the list. Then he drops the tray on the floor, steps over the boiling puddle and leaves.

That's the first few pages, and it tells you everything about how this world works.

What makes the book so good is how quietly awful the idea is. Withdrawn words aren't destroyed. They sit in boxes in the shop, and Letta flips through one without really thinking about it. Dream. Hope. Love. Faith.

A boy comes in that same afternoon to hand in a word he found on an old piece of paper, because that is what you're meant to do with a stray word. The word is ant. He doesn't know what it means. Nobody says ant in Ark any more. There's only insects.

The rest of it is beautifully built. Houses put up before the Melting. Windmills that might fail at any moment. A queue forming at Central Kitchen. Books, glass and fires treated as extravagances from a vanished world.

Two things are worth a parent's attention. The gavver's visit is menacing and ends with a child getting scalded, and that tone holds. And the central idea, that Love and Hope can simply be filed away, sits heavier than most adventure stories do. Nothing in the opening is gory. It's the cold that gets you.

This suits a reader who likes to think, and who notices words. If they mainly want chases and fights, they may find the first stretch slow, because it spends its time on a girl at a desk with a pen.

What to read next

If Ark takes hold, The Girl of Ink & Stars will suit them next. Isabella is another girl learning her father's craft, in her case mapmaking, on an island where a governor has quietly taken things away and nobody explains why the songbirds went.