Two students using a magical artifact teleport to a fantasy realm—straight out of the pages of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges—where the author is alive and imprisoned in a remarkable library.

Smith offers a YA fantasy starring the same lead as her debut novel, The Forest in the Hallway (2006). Beatriz has a talent for stumbling into alternative-reality realms and figuring out their riddles. Now a college student, Beatriz and her moth-studying best friend, Iris, have embarked on summer internships and studies overseas in the Middle Eastern nation of Uqbar. The country intrigues Beatriz because it puts her in the vicinity of the miragelike realm of Tlön, a land (or indeed a whole other planet) from the writings of her favorite author, Borges. Beatriz “had discovered his Labyrinths during her first year at Huxley College for Women, and he was an inspiration for her choice of Uqbar as a place to study abroad.” After many foreboding warnings that Tlön is not real, that the inhabitants are unfriendly, and that only a few people go there, the young women are informed by Professor Ptolemy that a museum relic—a decorative glove—can teleport them, somewhat haphazardly, to the realm. But the place is in a state of crisis. Foreign invaders—oddly dubbed the North Americans—have rolled in with military hardware and massive numbers. They want to get their greedy hands on a fantastic Tlön resource: a largely subterranean library (from the Borges story “The Library of Babel”) that theoretically contains every book ever written and thus, much dangerous and powerful knowledge. Moreover, via visions, Beatriz knows that Borges himself (though he died in 1986) is held captive in the library in a ruthless bid by the North Americans to solve the mystery of the institution’s organization. There appears to be no card catalog.

Needless to say, the engrossing text is fecund with literary and pop-culture references, as might be expected from material drawn from a Borges story cycle. There is dream logic of a kind that interweaves with quantum physics and is its own source of surrealism. Even nice, blind Borges cannot offer an explanation of how he came to be trapped in a solid construct of his own imagination (though some outside scholarship by readers will uncover that this is a classic Borges-ian dilemma). Smith does not write a condescending fairy tale for a school-age demographic. Even when wild animals help Beatriz, they remain, thankfully, largely inscrutable and non-English speakers (take that, Harry Potter). Curiously, the North Americans evoke little sense of danger and are routed by Tlön mysticism. The storied Tlön itself feels like a strange hybrid of the Westernized mundane (computer users and restaurant workers going about their daily business) and Through the Looking Glass fantastical. The most distinctive feature is a Tlön subculture of Lake People who change their genders at will—which evidently gives the North American interlopers the willies. (The author’s name was Gordon Smith when the first book was published, and she has since transitioned.) Beatriz even muses about the adventuresome sexual possibilities with her main Lake Person ally, but in between trying to rescue Borges and fix a few alt-universes, the college student remains chaste.

A curious and engaging LGTBQ+–friendly narrative of metafictional fantasy and offbeat whimsy.