“One thing’s for sure, I’m not in kansas anymore.” It was a phrase in half the languages he knew and one that had led to a saying almost as ancient: “We don’t even know what kansas is anymore.”

Imagine a room. A single colossal room, jam packed with shelves. And on those shelves, books, thousands and millions of books.

Now imagine that that’s only one such room, miles to a side. And there are doors to other rooms, also full of books. Uncountably many such rooms behind uncountably many doors. And there are even more. Doors to nowhere. Doors to an ‘in between’.

That’s just cool worldbuilding.

Add to that layers of civilizations that rise, find the library, use it to rise even further and faster–only to fall in turn. Over and over again.

And, perhaps, not all of them human.

That is the world of The Library Trilogy.

“Not true, no. Let’s say . . . representative. Useful. Irad the first librarian, son of Enoch the first builder of cities, son of Cain the first murderer, son of Adam the first man. None of Adam’s descendants were their parents’ only child, and all of them were in conflict. It’s a defining feature of mankind. Sibling against sibling.”

Add to that Livira–a young girl from far in the wastes outside the city, chosen for something more–and Evar–who has lived his entire life trapped in the library. Desperately searching for a way out.

I loved both viewpoints–and even more when they start to collide. There are more than a few twists in this book. Some I saw coming… and some big ones I did not.

“Yute told me a great writer once said that fiction was easy—all you have to do is sit in front of a blank page and bleed.”

“So, what’s the system here?”

“That depends if it was designed by librarians,” Livira said. “Or by sane people.”

Man this was a fun book. And to find that it’s the first of a trilogy? I see what it’s setting up, but I really have no idea how you can follow that up. I suppose we’ll just have to see!

Onward!

Side note, each chapter has an epigraph, from books both in universe and not. This one particularly amused me:

Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.

Prince of Fools, by Mark Lawrence