Play Book Tag discussion

An award-winning book that has a lot to recommend itself and I liked it but it didn't blow me away. In this fantasy/alternative history, silver has magical properties. When embossed on two sides with foreign words and then spoken, the silver bars are embedded in machinery, vehicles, and ships to give them more power, more speed, and more strength. However, they have to be the right pairs of words in two different languages. The people who can do this are trained in London at Oxford. There is a school in the University called Babel and that is where they are trained. They come from diverse countries and have been specifically selected for their intelligence.

I enjoyed hearing the history of language but it delved so deeply that it was annoying at times. The story was often bogged down in minutiae. It picked up further into the book when Robin meets other young students when he, and they, enter Babel in their first year. As the story goes on, though, it becomes more about colonialism and prejudice. There's quite a bit of action as many students set out to right a wrong.

The audio was well done with at least 2 readers, male and female. It is important that the words are pronounced correctly and there seem to be footnotes that are read by the narrators in a different voice, could it possibly be the author? This is a 500 page book and a long audio.