I was previously unfamiliar with Jedediah Berry, and despite a striking cover, I would have let The Naming Song pass me by without a strong recommendation from a book club friend who loved the language element. So I decided to give it a try after all. 

The Naming Song takes place after an underdescribed apocalypse—when something fell from the something tree—that destroyed much of prior society and robbed it of language. Since then, diviners have tirelessly sought names for everyday phenomena, in a world where knowing a thing’s name carries a kind of magic with it. The unnamed lead is tasked with delivering these names, but suspicion of a conspiracy sends her off into a world of ghosts and monsters with little idea of who to trust. 

Somehow, this is my second read this year with lyrical prose and a dreamlike, ghost-ridden post-apocalyptic setting, and The Naming Song certainly shares structural similarities with We Are All Ghosts in the Forest. The first third of the novel largely features the lead going about her business, with a rise in external dangers and some judicious flashbacks hinting at a hazy picture of danger, growing ultimately into a fast-paced thriller of a final third. 

While there were times that I found the first third so hazy that I had a hard time fully immersing in the story, the strangeness of the world and the beauty of the storytelling kept me engaged, and the middle third saw both plot movement and an expansion of the backstory—combined with some exceptional references to lost culture that will be very familiar to the reader. Despite the haziness of so much of the world, key plot points were foreshadowed well enough to keep the reader in anticipation for the hints to come good. Those who dislike guessing plot points in advance may even find the foreshadowing too thorough, though the quality of storytelling is high enough to preserve plenty of emotional impact, even for events I could see coming. 

My main complaint is one I seem to commonly have with dreamlike narratives, and it’s the tendency to slip into thriller pacing toward the end. The fuzziness in the worldbuilding can—it doesn’t have to, but it can—generate a lack of friction between tasks that leads to the story barreling from one thing to another with hardly room for the characters to catch their breath in between. And for certain sorts of readers, that may even be a positive. But I am not one of them, and I found myself wanting the plot progression to slow down and linger more on how it affects the characters and world. In particular, there is one action scene near the end of the book that was so heavily unbalanced toward the physical destruction and away from the emotional impact that it felt like an interminable sequence of punch and counterpunch. 

But for all my frustrations with the pacing of the book’s final third, it fully recovers for the emotional climax of the story, making good on foreshadowed plot points in a way that generates true emotional depth in the ways it affects the characters and changes the world. It’s also a book that lets the ending breathe—perhaps not quite to a Lord of the Rings-style drawn-out conclusion, but enough to give the reader an extended glimpse into the characters’ lives in the transformed world brought about in the climax. There are still some elements of the backstory that go entirely unexplained, but the ending recovers to tie up enough loose threads to be satisfying to the reader and to deliver some truly beautiful moments. 

Ultimately, while the dreamlike narrative of The Naming Song sometimes works against it—making it hard to fully immerse early and throwing off the pacing late—the fascinating world and beautiful storytelling are still well worth the price of admission. 

Recommended if you like: literary-leaning, dreamlike fantasy; the power of words.

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Reference Materials and is also Published in 2024, Features Dreams, and Features Criminals.

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.