Guest Post: Victoria Schwab on The Archived

Victoria Schwab, author of The Near Witch (read Kelly's review here), has a new novel coming out January 22, and we're pleased to be a stop on the vlog tour leading up to its publication! The concept stood out to me immediately: the Archive is a library of the dead, where those dead act as books of history. There are certain people - librarians - who have the ability to "read" these histories of people's lives. 

Sounds cool, right? Goodreads has a more detailed synopsis:

Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures that only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.

Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was, a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often-violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.

Being a Keeper isn't just dangerous-it's a constant reminder of those Mac has lost. Da's death was hard enough, but now her little brother is gone too. Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself might crumble and fall.

In this haunting, richly imagined novel, Victoria Schwab reveals the thin lines between past and present, love and pain, trust and deceit, unbearable loss and hard-won redemption.

As part of the tour, Victoria has created a series of vlogs that tell a little about what a person could read if she were a History in the Archive. STACKED is stop 12 on the tour, and we get a story about Neil Gaiman and hugs - both things worthy of discussion!

Victoria introduces the idea of the Archived and the vlog tour in the video below:


And you can read her History in this video:

To view all the videos in the vlog tour, including part one of the Neil Gaiman story, you can visit Victoria's Youtube channel. Victoria's also given us a swag pack to give away to one lucky reader (a tote bag and a couple of bookmarks), and I've thrown in a finished copy of the book when it publishes in January! To enter the giveaway, fill out the form below: