The Broken Teaglass, by Emily Arsenault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Any author who can stimulate a reader’s interest in reading about her main characters reading the dictionary is pretty darned good, and that’s exactly what Emily Arsenault has accomplished in her debut novel, The Broken Teaglass.

The narrator is a new college grad, Billy Webb, who is perplexed about where a philosophy major might find his place in the world. He grows even more perplexed when he finds himself accepting a job as editorial assistant at an iconic dictionary publishing house, which is quiet as a tomb. For folks who work with words, the staff is remarkably reclusive and laconic, but Billy manages to befriend another young assistant, Mona Minot. A large part of their work involves finding new words and defining new uses of old words, which requires much research in the company’s library of ten million word “citations”.

In the process, they happen upon a series of “cits” written by a Dolores Beekmim, which when read together appear to form a confession to a nebulous yet disturbing crime. Under Mona’s prodding, Billy joins her in a painstaking search to discover who wrote the cits and committed what seems to have been murder, without tipping off their colleagues, who, after all, may have been involved in the crime.

As a mystery, the book is not particularly suspenseful, but along the way, the two protagonists reveal much about themselves, twining a coming of age thread into the mix. Essentially, all the characters are intelligent but socially inept versions of, well, nerds, partly due to the exacting and dry nature of their work as lexicographers. There are some scenes featuring Billy’s hippy neighbors, but their role in the story never becomes important.

As much fun as following the mystery plot is learning about the nuts and bolts of dictionary writing – who gets to decide if new words are “real” and which of them should be included in upcoming revisions. The Broken Teaglass might not be your cup of tea if you’re looking for action and adventure, but for readers like me who love words, it makes for quirky and fascinating reading.

This guest review was contributed by You’re History! On this blog, the writer reads and listens to books constantly, reviewing for You’re History, Amazon and Vine, Goodreads, and quite often, by authors’ requests. The writer also works at two local historic house museums, and other posts reflect those interests, particularly medieval and U.S. History.