It’s been a hot minute since I read a book by Mark Lawrence, but this one captivated me. A magical library? How am I not going to fall in love. But this book was more than that. Keep reading this book review of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn for my full thoughts.
Summary
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.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Okay so I was about 70% through when I started recommending this book to others. I was like, “so it’s about this magical library…” This seems like a dream for me, except one person’s paradise is another person’s trap. What I appreciate is that Lawrence has committed to this idea of a timey wimey unending library. Told through the eyes of a few characters, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is about potential, cleverness, and the power of knowledge.
To know that the ones who control the knowledge, the history, can control the past, the present, and the limitations of the future. That the ones who can re-tell history, alter what is recorded, have the control over the past, the victors, and the spoils. All the conditions which influence the present. And that when we’ve impacted the history of all that was, all that could be, we limit the potentials of imagination. That the ones who control the knowledge become indispensable. This is definitely a book which swept me away with the themes. The ideas that just because something is ‘written’ doesn’t mean it’s fact.
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But the action and the characters, even if they took second place, were wonderfully compelling. With some lyrical lines, Livira and Evar captivated me. There’s this sense of fate and destiny, of interwoven invisible ink and mystery. It means that I kept reading more than I expected because I wanted to know what would happen. Find The Book That Wouldn’t Burn on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.