The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence – Review

Published: May 9, 2023

Publisher: Ace Books

Series: The Library Trilogy #1

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 576 (Hardcover)

My Rating : 4.5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:

A boy has lived his whole life trapped within a vast library, older than empires and larger than cities.

A girl has spent hers in a tiny settlement out on the Dust where nightmares stalk and no one goes.

The world has never even noticed them. That’s about to change.

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.

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What avid reader doesn’t love a book about more books? I admit, I can’t get enough of this particular theme so obviously the synopsis for The Book that Wouldn’t Burn had me hook, line, and sinker. A book about a boy who lives in an endless library and a girl who’s training to work the same infinite library? Sign me the hell up!

Much to my delight this book was everything I thought it would be and so, so much more! The story is dual POV, featuring Livira, a plucky and razor-sharp girl brought to Crath City after her desert town was raided by sabbers, a group of canid humanoids warring against the humans, and Evar, a boy who has lived in the Library for his entire life with his four “siblings”. At first it’s unclear how the two characters might come to meet one another and even once I had formed an idea of how it might happen, I was still wonderfully incorrect! I won’t spoil it because finding these things out is half the fun of reading a story like this!

Livira’s POV is one of exploration and learning, as she is training to become a Librarian (and doing quite well at it) but she’s also a singularly curious person even among those who are always searching for knowledge. Her adventures trekking through the Library and it’s forbidden or inaccessible chambers were some of my favorite parts. Evar, on the other hand, is confined to a single room of the Library, albeit a large one. He and his siblings were trapped in a device called the Mechanism, which allows a reader to fully experience a book and intimately learn the skills or knowledge therein. The Mechanism trapped them all at different times, but spat them out together and they were raised by the Soldier and the Assistant. Evar is a mediator between his siblings who all came out of the Mechanism with different skill sets. Evar just came out feeling as if he was missing someone – a girl – and so he reads and searches for any inkling of who she might have been.

The Book that Wouldn’t Burn was a book of discovery and defied expectations that left me longing for the sequel upon closing the final page. The good news is, Mark Lawrence has already completed writing of the trilogy but I believe there is still about a year between each release. I adored the characters, but found Livira especially endearing thanks to her tenacity and the friendships she forges with her fellow Library candidates. Evar is nearly just as likable, but his side of the story gives you for more questions than answers at first so while I was intrigued at first, I didn’t start to enjoy his chapters as much until a bit further into the book. I think this might be my new favorite of Mark Lawrence’s books, though the competition is tough! 

*I’d like to give a brief nod to all the fun shout outs that Mark did throughout the book, whether it be via secondary character names (Zackar Gyle, Hiago Abdalla) or via the quotes at the beginning of each chapter, though those were more easter eggs than shout outs!