Brainfullofbooks

Mark Lawernce begins The Book That Wouldn’t Burn with Livira, a girl who’s as scrappy and tough as the weed she’s name after.  She would have to be, living out in the desert wasteland they call the dust.  Almost immediately her mettle is put to the test when someone attacks her village and takes all the children hostage.  As if that weren’t enough upheaval, her life is turned upside down when they’re rescued by a group of soldiers and taken to the city.  A lesser girl would have crumpled under all this change and pressure, but Livira thrives everywhere, gaining a foothold in any new place.  It’s hardly surprising when she succeeds in getting a position at the library: one of the city’s most coveted prizes.  Meanwhile Evar has lived his entire life in the library with only the company of his “siblings”.  They’re not really his siblings, but they call themselves that since they’re all each other has ever known. All thanks to the mechanism: a machine capable of bringing books to life.  Think of it as a 3-dimensional chamber or the holodeck from Star Trek.  Each of them stepped into it with a book, decades and centuries apart.  The machine trapped them there, preserved them inside until one day spitting them out into the library, now experts on the knowledge within the book they brought into the mechanism with them.  All except for Evar.  He’s no stronger or smarter or wiser for it.  All he gained was a hole in his memory and the certainty that there was something—something missing, someone waiting for him to get back to.  Eventually their stories collide as they set out to uncover the secrets of the library—together.

Evar is a wonderful character and I loved him, but Livira to me was the true star of the show.  She reminded me so much of Lyra from His Dark Materials with her strong will and cunning nature and I loved her immediately.  Some authors—especially male authors—have issues portraying girls.  Trying to write from the viewpoint of young children is hard enough but add to that the difficulty of accurately rendering the opposite sex.  Many have tried and failed but Lawrence brilliantly captures the bravery, fierceness, and forcefulness of girls.  He’s captured the spirit of girlhood magnificently and for that I give him a standing ovation.  She’s determined and intelligent, and rough and wise and brave—and most of all brilliant.  It’s impossible not to see how bright, curious and inquisitive she is, even from the start.

The Book That Wouldn’t Burn reminds me of an ouroboros. The image of a snake biting its own tail is the perfect symbol of this story in so many ways.  The symmetry of it is nothing short of breathatking—it was so brilliant. Everything comes full circle—the beginning feeding into the ending which is of itself really the start of a new beginning.  It was so good it honestly reminded me of an excellent, especially tight episode of the beloved sci-fi tv show Doctor Who.  Perhaps that’s because of the way it plays with time and events feeding into themselves. Actions in Livira’s time affect Evar,  and  he reaches out and changes Livira’s entire life—as well as her time.  If things had not turned out that way in her time his would not have been the same . . . and if his was even slightly different her life and time would be changed.  One doesn’t exist without the other.

No book is complete without a plot twist, in fact most books rely on them to drive the narrative.  However, some do it better than others: in some cases, readers can see where the story is going, detect the plot twist coming over a mile away.  For instance, from the moment I started the book and learned he’d lost his memory I knew Livira would somehow be the one Evar had forgotten and needed to find.  But the twists in The Book That Wouldn’t Burn can’t be predicted.  Trust me, even if you’re an avid fan of sci-fi like me the surprises will leave you shocked and gaping at the page or screaming at an inanimate piece of paper.  They caught me completely off guard and had me shaking internally.  Really this reads as a sort of sci-fi mystery because the more you learn the more questions you have.  At least until all mystery and suspense comes to a breathtaking ending when it all finally becomes clear, and you’re left in awe of Lawrence’s brilliant planning.  The instant I closed the back cover I went to get the next book from my local library—convinced this had been published a while ago.  I needed to go right into the next book.  I was devastated to learn that I had to wait.  The second novel, The Book That Broke the World comes out April ninth of this year.  Honestly?  That’s much too far away for my taste.