Overall good start to a new trilogy but struggles with trying to do too much.
There were a lot of good things in this launch of a new trilogy by Mark Lawrence. However, this first book tried to do too much and left the story feeling like it had overstayed its welcome.
It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.
Master Synoth
3.5 / 5 stars
The boy has lived his whole life trapped within a book-choked chamber older than empires and larger than cities.
The girl has been plucked from the outskirts of civilization to be trained as a librarian, studying the mysteries of the great library at the heart of her kingdom.
They were never supposed to meet. But in the library, they did.
Their stories spiral around each other, across worlds and time. This is a tale of truth and lies and hearts, and the blurring of one into another. A journey on which knowledge erodes certainty and on which, though the pen may be mightier than the sword, blood will be spilled and cities burned.
I highly anticipated this book’s release and downloaded it as soon as it came out (early birthday present to me!) Mark Lawrence really impressed me with his Book of the Ancestor series, especially Red Sister. I was ready to dive into this series immediately and see what it had in store. A library-themed fantasy? I’m already in.
The Author’s Strengths
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn showcases many of Lawrence’s strengths as a fantasy writer: fully immersive, detailed – yet still mysterious world-building. Characters that jump off the page and you genuinely want to know what is going to happen to them. Excellent and imaginative prose that builds the tone for the overall story. Action-packed scenes that he writes like a cinematic vignette. The way Lawrence blends the characters and how they experience their environments I think is one of his greatest strengths. I also really enjoy his interpretation of fantasy with a sprinkling of sci-fi – it really drew me in to the unfolding of this world and its history.
Similar to another of Lawrence’s Series
The plot was fairly straight forward, and having read the Book of the Ancestor series, I noted a lot of similarities. All of them were given enough differences to make this not just a repeat of that series. It is kind of like the memes of comparing Star Wars to Harry Potter. There are a lot of similarities between the main characters (Livira in this one, Nona in the other) – the spunky, outcast girl that grows into the courageous and oftentimes foolhardy young woman – but he writes them so well and I really enjoyed Livira as a character. The settings were also obviously different, however the slow unveiling of their secrets and their histories were very similar between the this book and the series.
However, we don’t just follow Livira in this story. We also follow Evar and his story. Both protagonists have interesting stories on their own, but the real magic happens when their worlds finally converge.
“There’s a hole through the heart of me,” Evar said. “And it won’t be gone until I find her.”
But.
There is a significant amount of time spent developing both characters individually. When they finally do meet, I don’t think there is nearly enough time spent developing their relationship together. In the final act of the book (without spoilers), there is a sequence of events that happened to put their relationship in hyper-drive that was also written in a convoluted manner. It felt rushed and not very well explained after spending so much time living with these two characters individually for the bulk of the story. I was not very satisfied by the way their stronger, deeper relationship with each other came about. It seemed very much like magic for convenience’s sake, even though it did use established lore. It was also in the last act of the book where the mystery that the library presented started to get really convoluted.
I remember feeling this way about Grey Sister and how it finished – too many revelations that happened for the sake of the plot and weren’t solidly established in the rest of the novel. Lawrence spends a lot of time patiently peeling back the layers of the mystery, and then rushes to the end, which somehow results in a feeling of, “well, that was a really long, unsatisfying way to just have everything explained to me anyway.”
Recommendation
I think this story needed a little more focus and not rush to reveal its secrets just to set up the ending for a cliff-hanger and hook for the next book. The mystery itself would have been plenty to entice me into the next one. The character’s developing relationship would have been enough to hook me for the future.
I still really enjoyed this introduction to The Library Trilogy. I am definitely looking forward to the next book!
This review originally appeared on my Goodreads and StoryGraph accounts on June 2, 2023. I am eagerly awaiting the release of the next book in The Library Trilogy – The Book That Broke The World – on April 9, 2024.
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