The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence – Review

Published: April 9, 2024

Publisher: Ace

Series: The Library Trilogy #2

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 384 (Hardcover)

My Rating: 4 Stars

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

Synopsis:
Two people living in a world connected by a vast and mysterious library must fight for those they love in the second book in a new trilogy from the international bestselling author of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn.

The Library spans worlds and times. It touches and joins distant places. It is memory and future. And amid its vastness Evar Eventari both found, and lost, Livira Page.

Evar has been forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover the book she wrote—one which is the only true threat to the library’s existence—if she’s to return to her life.

While Evar’s journey leads him outside into the vastness of a world he’s never seen, Livira’s path will taker her deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written.

The secret war that defines the library has chosen its champions and set them on the board. The time has come when they must fight for what they believe, or lose everything.

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The Book That Broke the World was VERY high on my most anticipated sequels list for 2024 and I’m happy to say that I enjoyed it! It didn’t quite have the same mind blowing impact the first book did, but I suspect that’s because I knew what to expect going into this one. The first book had so many wonderful twists and character introductions that I was in a constant state of wonder. This time around, the world was more familiar though not entirely without exciting reveals.

Rather than jumping right back into the tale of Livira and Evar, we are introduced to two new characters. Celcha and Hellet are ganar slaves, working out in the Dust digging through old ruins for materials that can be sent back to the city. When they uncover a buried room full of books and claim they can recreate the order in which they were originally shelved, the two are taken to the Library and put to work opening the doors that only willing ganar hands can open. The ganar people are described as small golden-furred individuals who came down from one of the moons and need a tremendous amount of sleep, otherwise they die. For some reason I’m picturing them as pink fairy armadillos.

Fortunately, despite the introduction to our new characters, we soon return to the stories I’m most compelled by – those of Livira and Evar and the rest of their companions. It’s difficult to get into too many details because of the sheer number of spoilers I would have to deftly avoid. Let’s just say there are a few different plot lines following Livira and Malar, Evar and his siblings, and Arpix and the group of people who escaped the Library with him at the end of The Book That Wouldn’t’ Burn. Thanks to the nature of the library and the Exchange, not all of them are in the same time and place and much of the story is really leading up to a convergence of these disparate groups AND Celcha and Hellet. 

This was a great installment to the series, but I do think it suffered from middle book syndrome just a bit. It definitely felt like it was setting events up for the grand finale of the trilogy, which I do think is going to be pretty epic since our characters have picked their sides in the age-old disagreement between the founders of the Library. Overall, this was an enjoyable read that kept me thoroughly engaged, with just a dash of confusion because quite frankly this was denser than expected and the multiple ‘timelines’ got a bit overwhelming (especially for chill vacation reading).