The Book That Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence - Book Review

Series: The Library Trilogy #1 

Publication Date: 11th May 2023

Genre: Fantasy (Historical) 

3.3 Stars 

One Liner: Great premise; meandering execution (minority opinion) 

Livira, a young girl, lives all her life in a tiny settlement in the Dust until they are attacked by one party and saved by another. Some things don’t change even as her life changes. 

Evar has been trapped in a vast library all his life. He yearns for the freedom to explore the outside world and meet people other than the other kids trapped in the library along with him. 

The world hasn’t noticed them, but things will change now. Their stories continue to revolve around each other until they merge and blur. What happens to their stories, and what about the world outside that dislikes anyone different from them? 

The story comes in the third-person POV of Livira and Evar. 

What I Like:

The premise and the cover are fab. The world-building is elaborate and easy to visualize. 

Livira is an intriguing character. She is brave, bold, clever, eager, impulsive, and ready to do what it takes to get what she wants. Her character arc is aligned with the plot and makes it easy to see her action. 

Malar is my favorite character from the book. He starts out as a regular soldier, but we see there’s a lot more to him. Even though his back story is not provided, he is easy to like and support. 

The plot is convoluted but in a good way. Things fall into place and make sense as the reveals happen. The twists are all interesting and surprising. I wish some of them appear earlier. 

Dust, the settlement where Livira comes from, feels a lot like the indigenous settlements in the US. In fact, throughout the story, we can see parallels with real-life bias, racism, wars, etc. 

A few scenes remind me of scenes from Heidi. This is a plus for me, as I could connect a little more with Livira during her growing years in the kingdom.  

The raven and dog are great additions to the plot. I love the neverending library and its description. Such a wow place to be! 

What Didn’t Work for Me:

While the setting and world-building are beautiful, there’s quite a bit of repetition in explaining the details. I don’t need the same information repeated multiple times. Hopefully, this will be edited in the final version (mine is an ARC).

The story meanders almost throughout. Though I expected this in the first half, it gets exhausting when the plot drags for the majority of the book.  

As the story progresses, Evar and Livira’s worlds overlap. That means, when one character moves from their world to the other’s, the event is presented from both POVs to ‘fill the gaps’. In short, the book suffers from over-explanation.  

Despite Livira and Evar getting their own POVs, Livira gets more space. I feel like I know more about her than Evar. And there isn’t enough about Evar’s siblings (except Clovis). This makes it hard to connect with their characters. 

It gets preachy at times (more towards the end). I don’t mind some of it (expected to an extent), though it feels boring when the content is long-winded. In a way, the book deals with familiar themes, though it deals with some of them differently (not everything works well).  

I’m not sure which age group would be the perfect target audience for the book. The cuss words and a few other things make it inappropriate (not much) for MG, though YA readers might be bored by the story going in circles. 

To summarize, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is a book I wanted to love but ended up just liking it. It has some great points and will work for some readers. Do check out other reviews before you decide. I’m a minority here. 

Thank you, NetGalley, HarperCollins UK, and HarperVoyager, for the eARC. 

#NetGalley #TheBookThatWouldn’tBurn

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Note: The book ends on a cliffhanger. We have fewer answers in this one and a lot more questions left to explore in the other two books of the trilogy.