Wil Parke wakes up to find himself tortured and eventually kidnapped by a man calling himself Tom Eliot. Tom insists that a woman calling herself Virginia Woolf wants Wil dead for a past that Wil can't even remember. What has Wil forgotten that is so important to everyone? Meanwhile, a girl named Emily Ruff passes an unusual test and enters an academy where she is taught the value of language and how it can change the world.

LEXICON is a bit confusing initially as the story weaves back and forth between time and characters. The news articles and/or internet post excerpts included at the end of each chapter aid in creating the overall feeling that a greater conspiracy is at work. This helps pull the tale together as the concept is so startling that it boggles the mind. I particularly love that the characters took the names of poets as they create new identities after their training.

LEXICON is a cerebral thriller in which worlds wield incredible power, including the power to destroy. I love how Max Barry intertwines the mythology of various peoples and the Tower of Babel into the storyline as it gives credence to the storyline. The idea that language creates neurological changes in the brain isn't a new one but the ability to apply it as described in LEXICON certainly is. Readers who want a story that challenges accepted beliefs and asks us to look deeper at the words we so readily use will find LEXICON both fascinating and intellectually stimulating.

Book Summary

Few books are greeted with rave reviews everywhere from Time magazine and Salon to Boingboing and io9. Yet, Max Barry’s Lexicon is that rare thing: a thriller as high-octane as they come, driven by a brilliant and original plot that connects very modern questions of privacy and data collection to centuries-old ideas about the power of language.

At an exclusive training school at an undisclosed location outside Washington, D.C., students are taught to control minds, to wield words as weapons. The very best graduate as “poets” and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose. Recruited off the street, whip-smart Emily Ruff quickly learns the one key rule: never allow another person to truly know you. Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy, until she makes the catastrophic mistake of falling in love.