#Review - Daughter of Crows by Mark Lawrence #Fantasy #Epic

Series: The Academy of Kindness # 1
Format: 416 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: March 24, 2026
Publisher: ACE
Source: Publisher
Genre: Epic Fantasy

The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.

The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.

The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.

Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep. That was a mistake.

Daughter of Crows is the first installment in author Mark Lawrence's The Academy of Kindness, an epic fantasy featuring a strong heroine who explores the maiden/mother/crone mythos. After fifteen years away from pure, unfiltered darkness, Daughter of Crows delivers exactly what fans have been craving: blood-soaked halls, necromantic horrors, and a protagonist who refuses to fade quietly into old age. This is not another Library Trilogy-style puzzle box; it is raw, visceral, and unflinching—Lawrence’s darkest book to date. 

The main protagonist is Molly Plight, but she goes by several other names in this book: Mollandra, Rue, and Eldest. The Academy of Kindness does not raise saints. It forges Furies. Each year, 100 girls are sold at its gates. Ten years later, only three walk out—avatars of vengeance known as the Kindnesses, bound to the oldest laws of retribution. They train in the blood-drenched Wound Garden and learn forbidden secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. Mercy is not on the curriculum. 

Rue sold herself to the Academy after escaping a family that was breeding monsters. She survived. She became one of the three. Decades later, an elderly woman, finally carving out a fragile peace in a remote village, believes her killing days are behind her. Then, mercenaries bring war to her doorstep and slaughter everyone she has allowed herself to care for. Lawrence braids three timelines and multiple POVs (including Bek and Einsa's) with surgical precision. 

The present-day revenge plot collides with extended flashbacks to Rue’s brutal decade inside the Academy, while a third, even darker thread emerges later to tie everything together. Early chapters can feel disorienting as the threads shift and the world’s mythology is drip-fed, but once the pieces lock into place, the momentum is relentless. The past illuminates the present so perfectly that every choice Rue makes in her twilight years carries the full weight of her scarred history. 

In a genre crowded with twenty-something chosen ones, Rue is a revelation. Gray-haired, aching in every joint, yet still lethally competent, she is sharp-tongued, reflective, and terrifyingly pragmatic. Watching an older woman navigate physical frailty while wielding ancient necromancy and decades of tactical cunning is genuinely refreshing. Aging here is portrayed as both a curse and a gift—wisdom earned in blood, resilience forged in loss. 

The girls inside the Academy form a raw, trauma-bonded sisterhood that feels painfully real. Even the most monstrous characters make sense; the world broke them first. No one is spared the cost of survival. The Academy itself is a masterclass in dark academia done right—Gothic, oppressive, and dripping with mythological resonance. The Furies (the Kindly Ones) loom over everything; their ancient laws demand retribution that even gods fear to interrupt. Necromancy is grotesque and costly, described in stomach-turning yet beautiful prose. 

Violence is never glorified for its own sake; it is always heavy with consequence. Later in the story, it seems as though the Kindly Ones have been eradicated by a group known as the Cruelties, who know Molly very well. Several key questions are addressed in this story. Can you ever truly escape the person the world made you? What does vengeance cost when you are no longer young or whole? How do love and friendship survive inside a machine built to produce monsters? This is a fantastic start to a new series. I have been a fan of the author for years and will continue reading this series even with an emotionally shattering cliffhanger ending. 

1

Molly Plight

The calm before this particular storm had lasted ten years, much of which Molly Plight had spent knitting. Trouble had arrived in the shape of a man of no great height, road-dirty and weather-beaten. Save for the cruel curve of the knife at his hip and the dull glint of mail beneath his fleece, there would have been nothing to mark him. But when he paused in the inn's doorway and smiled that smile, Molly knew that the peace she'd thought would claim her final days was over. She knew what a predator's hunger looked like.

"That bull the Millers have won't last another season." Jayne Clay, the tiny old woman on Molly's left, was given to predicting the death of prized livestock. That topic and regaling anyone who so much as paused in her vicinity with the doings of her two dozen towheaded grandchildren constituted the majority of her conversation.

Molly's needles and ball of yarn lay on the table before her, abandoned in favour of a pipe and a drink. The village children said the pipe smelled like a burning midden heap, perhaps not unfairly, but good weed was hard to find so far from anywhere. The small, thick glass in her hand held ulik, a treacle-dark liquor the locals brewed from turnips. She watched the mercenary cross to the bar. "Maybe."

"Maybe?" Doubt was a slap in the face where Jayne's predictions were concerned. Her ability to number the days of anything with hooves was legendary. "It's a certainty, girl!"

Molly sipped her ulik and made a face. Pipe smoke had numbed her tongue to the stuff's foulness, but she could still taste it. On her other side the third of their trio, Ambeth, hugged her ample belly and cackled at Molly being called a girl. Jayne and Ambeth might have a decade and more on Molly, but in no world that they knew of was anyone north of sixty summers a girl.

Cackled. Molly sipped again, winced again, and considered laughter. Age had blunted much of her sharpness, but in turn it had put a harsh edge on her voice and turned laughs into cackles. Still, if that was the worst the years had done to her she would consider herself blessed.

"Another round, girls?" Ambeth patted her coin pouch. She'd sold all the cheeses she'd brought into Stones Corner on Davy's cart, even the blue that stank worse than Vale pipe-weed, and for once could back her generous instincts with funds.

A "no" opened Molly's mouth but she bit down on it and shaped a "yes." One for the road. One to numb the aches before they walked the four miles back to Pye.

The tides that had left her stranded in the Vale a decade back had given no hint that her driftwood life had found its resting place. For the first few years everything had felt temporary-her pack ready by the door for a departure that never came. Instead, the slow and simple existence she'd picked up in the village of Pye had worked a strange magic on her. The steel spring that she had begun coiling in her chest at an age when she should have been chasing butterflies, or at least dreaming grand and empty dreams as she scratched a living from the soil, had started to unwind. The anger that she had for so many years bound ever more tightly at her core had somehow begun to seep away. The dark dreams, the watchful ways, the cynical poison that soured her days, all of it had started to leave her, worn away by passing seasons. Worn away by something as trivial as the community of peasants with no more learning among the lot of them than could be found in the head of any first-year acolyte of Kindness.

Ambeth struggled out of her seat and went to get the drinks, complaining of stiff legs. A mercenary wouldn't raise many eyebrows in the cities of the west, but out in the sticks where an oddly coloured pig could be the village's main subject of debate for several weeks, the man was drawing attention. Ambeth eyed him up and down as she approached, wrinkling her nose at the unfamiliar stink of him.

Molly stood, muttering something about the privy. It had been a long time since she'd been called on to do what had once been second nature to her. She had put all that aside, buried it both literally and figuratively. It had stayed buried so long that she had started to believe that that part of her life was over. She'd started to think that this was what her death might be, the slow setting aside of the things that had once defined her. A shedding of armour, one layer at a time. Until at last, she might go to her grave shriven of her burdens-stained by guilt but no longer defined by it.

She cursed as a second, larger man banged in through the street door, this one with a sword on his belt and a blackened iron breastplate. They had to be here for her. Nothing else made any sense. There wasn't anything a mercenary could carry away from the market of Stones Corner that would compensate the long ride to get to it.

2

Rue

Age would have taken her if they'd just had the sense to leave well enough alone. Some problems are like that-if you ignore them long enough, they go away. Most problems, actually.

The crow hops from one foot to the other on the haft of a broken spear. The feast before it is reflected in the black beads of its eyes. An open grave in which bodies lie in their scores, layered carelessly, sprawled face down as if they might have fallen here rather than been tossed in from the edge of the cold slot in the ground.

The crow cocks its head, choosing. The mottled patchwork shows little exposed flesh: muddy homespun, bloody shawls, grey hair here, darker locks there. No warriors these, just peasants. Hard lives and easy kills.

Cawww? The crow looks up to where a figure looms at the grave's edge, dark against the sky's pain as the last of the sun's light bleeds away. Here stands a man of war, tall in the sharp angles of his armour, unbowed by the rain-laced wind that tugs at his cloak.

"Fly away, storm crow. There's nothing for you here."

The crow doesn't challenge the lie. But its gaze flickers to the dead.

"Greater gods than you have run before me." A low thunder edges the voice of this man who is more than a man. "Their temples lie in ruin. Their statues are cast down. Their priests are crucified. Their faithful call my name."

The crow caws but keeps its place on the broken spear that is anchored in the back of a child.

The man draws his sword, pale steel that looks like a cold flame in the last light of the day.

"Do you threaten me with that?" The crow is gone, and in its place a woman stands in the grave, her bare feet on the uneven ground of stiff limbs and narrow backs. "I have no temples, no statues, no priests, no faithful." Despite her newfound height the woman's head is still below the grave's edge.

"Play no games with me." The warrior levels his blade at her.

"Games?" She smiles up at him, her face indistinct, flickering, perhaps from that of one corpse to the next as she picks her way among them. "Are you going to jump down and poke at me with your little sword? I might enjoy that, Sunder."

Sunder's teeth show beneath his helm's guard. "I know your names too. Do not think I don't. Saraswati, Thalia, Woman of the Spiders, Morrigan, many others. You cannot hide from me. This is my empire. There is no space for you here, no souls to steal. Fly away."

The woman's face hardens, ages, wrinkles spreading, eyes shading to pale, holding a cold and empty light. "Knowing my names is not knowing me. You have nothing I want, little boy. It's not in my nature to take . . . only to test. You wouldn't want to go untested, would you? Older gods than I would be displeased by that."

He throws the sword like a spear, swift and true. But the woman is gone, and the returned crow has fluttered skywards, snatched away by the wind. The man remains a few moments longer, sniffing at the air, scanning the blasted heath, peering into the grave's gloom as the shadows thicken. He does not, however, climb in to retrieve his sword. He leaves between one heartbeat and the next, as if he were never here, as if there had been no man, no woman, just a crow already too full of carrion to dip its beak. And of course, the corpses.


Anight settled in, and later a grey dawn struggled over the horizon. But not until the first rays of the sun reached into the grave and found her outstretched fingers did the old woman draw in a sudden, unexpected breath and raise her face to the world. If any other within the corpse heap were still among the living, then the cold light burning in her eyes would have persuaded them to play dead a little longer.


Rue had been born screaming at the world with an anger that took sixty years to fade. Even then her new neighbours had known that though she might look like them, she carried something else within her. Hard as nails, they said. A mean streak. Something in the way she looks at you. Had they known how deep that difference ran, they would have quietly left their homes in the night and never come back. She had told them a name that was true, though it had been so long since she had used it that it had felt like a lie.

The crow that had been following her since the grave landed close by.

"Stop following me, bird." Rue wouldn't normally waste words on a crow, but she needed distraction from her pain. "If I was going to die, I'd have done it back there." Her head ached as if what had struck her had been an axe and the blade was still buried in the back of her skull. "Fuck off!"

"I can't." The bird's croak sounded like words to Rue's scrambled brains.

Rue stopped walking and finally reached back to examine the damage. Clearly the blow had fractured her thinking. "Whoresons!" The oath escaped her through clenched teeth, but questing fingers had found no obvious fracture, just the tar-like adhesion of old blood in matted hair.

She turned on unsteady feet to examine the crow, now watching her from a rock five yards back along her trail. She had not expected a reply. Even on a day when she'd hauled herself from an open grave, this was still the strangest thing to have happened.

"Don't test me, bird." She eyed the ground for a suitable stone, though the thought of bending to pick one up made her teeth grind against the anticipated pain. Every part of her hurt, and the sole advantage to the agony in her head was that it at least shut out the rest of her body's complaints-for the most part.

"Test you? That's not what I'm here to do."

The crow's croaking was at once a human voice and also just a bird's chatter. Rue took it as more confirmation that the blow that had put her down, deep enough to be taken for dead, had rearranged her mind. "Madness" was the word that suggested itself. With a groan, she bent and scooped up a stone from the side of the track.

"I can't stop following you!" Panic in the croaking now. The voice was somehow familiar.

More madness. Rue raised her arm to throw.

"She told me I had to!"

"She?" Rue knew better than to feed a delusion. But there had been a she. Somewhere in the depths from which Rue had hauled herself, a climb that began long before she could raise her head and contemplate escaping the grave, there had been a woman. A woman of uncertain age. Of uncertain everything. But the climb had begun with her touch. With the pressure of her bony foot between Rue's shoulder blades, perhaps a great enough pressure to squeeze out a reluctant beat from a still heart.

"She. You know. Her!" The crow hopped nervously from foot to foot, eyeing the stone in Rue's hand.

Rue did not know, but another thought possessed her. "You sound like Senna Weaver."

The bird said nothing.

"I don't like Senna Weaver."

The bird shifted its feet.

"The only good thing about getting attacked was seeing that old cunt take an arrow in the-"

The crow launched itself at Rue in an explosion of feathers. She caught it around the neck, its beak two inches from her eye.

"I'm slow, but not that slow." Rue snarled the words while tightening her grip on the fragile neck.

"Wait! Don't!" Everyone croaks when they're choking, but a crow double-croaks.

Rue squeezed a touch harder, then with an oath threw the bird away. It landed poorly and stared up at her, eyes black beads of malice.

"Killing you would be a waste of a good joke. Stay a crow." She turned her back. "I hope you like worms, Senna."

"Why didn't you kill me when I was a person?" the crow cawed after her. "She said you'd killed more people than the cholera."

"I'm not a killer," Rue muttered.

The path before her wound around a rise where thorn bushes and stunted trees huddled together, toughing out the wind. On the far side, sheltered by the ridge, the village waited for her. Her small house, her narrow bed, the peace that had become her normal far faster than she had ever expected it to. "I'm not a killer."

"Everyone said you were. Everyone said back in the day they called you-"

"The only person who said that was you, Senna Weaver. Stirring up trouble for me from the day I arrived. Starting rumours. You took against me-" Rue clamped her jaw shut to keep back the loose thoughts spilling from her rattled skull. She might not want to be a killer, but to say that she wasn't didn't make it so. She had to be again the thing she had once been, the one who wore this name. The Rue who succeeded in part because of skill, in part because of venom, but truly because she was part of that rare fraternity of individuals grouped only by a single characteristic. Namely that they were, for some gods-touched reason, hard to kill. That where others would fall or freeze or be overtaken by the horror of violence and adversity, Rue's kind evened the odds by stabbing someone in the throat. Rue was the sort that somehow washed ashore when everyone else from captain to cabin boy drowned. The kind found limping from the bloodiest quarter of the battlefield. The kind that crawled from the grave spitting earth and ready for vengeance.

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#Review - The Book That Held Her Heart by Mark Lawrence #Fantasy #Epic

Series: The Library Trilogy (#3)
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Release Date: April 8, 2025
Publisher: Ace
Source: Publisher
Genre: Epic / Fantasy

Two people once connected by a vast and mysterious library are now separated and must overcome time and distance to reunite and bring peace to their worlds, in the final book of the Library Trilogy.

The fate of an infinite library hangs on one book, a book that holds the power to break the unbreakable. In the face of such forces, fragile things like hearts, worlds, and even family seem certain to fail.

The people most vital to Livira are scattered across time and space—lost, divided into factions, in mortal peril. Somehow she must bring them together and resolve the unresolvable argument that fuels the library’s war.

The bond between Livira and Evar has stretched and stretched again. Can it hold at the end, when things fall apart? Can it unite them against impossible odds?

This is the last chapter, the final page. The end threatens and no one—not characters, readers, or even the author—will emerge unscathed.

“Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people”

Mark Lawrence's The Book That Held Her Heart is the third and final installment in the authors The Library Trilogy. The book alternates between multiple perspectives—Livira, Evar, Anne, and others—each offering a distinct lens on the sprawling conflict. The infinite library, a labyrinthine marvel that has been both sanctuary and battleground throughout the trilogy, teeters on the brink of collapse thanks, in part, to a power hungry King and 3 different species all with their own agendas. Its fate hinges on Livira's book—one with the power to "break the unbreakable." 

The stakes couldn’t be higher: hearts, families, and entire worlds hang in the balance. Livira, the fiercely determined protagonist whose journey has been shaped by the library’s mysteries, finds herself separated from those she holds dear, scattered across time and space. Evar, her counterpart and emotional anchor, is similarly adrift, their bond stretched to its limits. The narrative poses a haunting question: can love, loyalty, and hope endure when everything falls apart? 

Lawrence expands the scope of the trilogy and his world by introducing Anne Hoffman, a Jewish girl in prewar Nazi Germany, whose story intertwines with the library’s timeless war. This real-world thread is a bold gamble, but one that pays off, grounding the fantastical in a poignant historical context. The library becomes a metaphor for memory, knowledge, and the human cost of their preservation—or destruction. Livira and Evar remain the beating heart of the trilogy, their relationship a thread tested by distance, time, and the library’s unrelenting demands. 

Livira’s tenacity and Evar’s quiet strength are pushed to their breaking points, yet their growth feels earned, not contrived. Anne, a newcomer, brings a fresh perspective; her innocence and courage in the face of encroaching darkness add a layer of urgency and heartbreak. Supporting characters like Yute, Yolanda, Carlotte, Clovis, Kerrol, and Mayland—each get their moment to shine, their arcs converging in a climax that leaves no one unscathed. 

The library’s war—pitting preservation against destruction, memory against oblivion—mirrors humanity’s own struggles with history and identity. Lawrence doesn’t shy away from heavy questions: What is worth saving? What must be sacrificed? The inclusion of Nazi Germany as a setting underscores the trilogy’s relevance, drawing a chilling line from book burnings to the Holocaust, yet never feeling didactic. Lawrence, a seasoned storyteller known for his grimdark roots, proves once again that his skill lies not just in crafting brutal worlds but in weaving intricate tapestries of human experience—here, centered around the infinite Athenaeum, a library that transcends time, space, and comprehension.

Chapter 1

Anne

As a baby, Anne had taken her first ever steps among the aisles of what her grandfather called his library but was in fact a second-hand bookshop. It wasn't even his, since his mother, the Hoffman matriarch, was still alive, though you wouldn't know it to look at her. Anne had been told that Great-grandma Ruth was ninety-three, but she had seen, in one of the huge encyclopaedias that had to be lifted down for her, an engraving of an ancient queen embalmed with forgotten skill and preserved against the tide of nearly fifty centuries. Nana Ruth looked every bit as old as the queen amid her wrappings.

In any case, it was within these musty aisles that Anne had taken that first step, and later read her first word, which in retrospect had been a step of more significance, carrying her over an invisible threshold into a world much larger than that occupied by those who rarely choose to exercise their imagination.

As a toddler, and in fact until she was older than she was now prepared to admit, Anne had thought her grandfather's shop to be endless. She had believed that there would always be another corner to turn, another previously unknown aisle to discover, the shelves overfull, spine crowding spine, other books pushed in horizontally to rest atop their more orderly fellows.

She had of course, in the intervening years, discovered the rear wall and traced its entirety, which was unbroken but for a single door leading to a workshop where her father had once been employed repairing any book of sufficient rarity and value to deserve such attention. The shop stretched back much further than a casual visitor might imagine, but it most definitely had its limits. A fact that had simultaneously comforted and disappointed the young Anne, the balance between the two emotions varying across years as she grew older, or even from the morning of one day to the evening of the next.

At sixteen, she watched the shop when her grandfather's other business took him across town. Watching the shop mainly meant watching the door, since once a potential customer had disappeared among the shelves there was no telling where they might be. "Count them in. Count them out." This was her grandfather's instruction, written in a faded hand on yellowing paper pinned behind the till. The shop had to operate on an honour system since there was no way of knowing if someone were spiriting out a book under their jacket. Though if the person emerging from the aisles appeared considerably fatter than the one that entered, this was a pretty clear sign that they should be hoisted by the ankles and shaken until evidence of their crime presented itself.

Sadly, in Anne's view, no shaking took place, and any thefts went largely unnoticed amid the uncatalogued plenty of their stock. Replenishments for the books sold or stolen came largely from house sales where the occupant had died, and their descendants wanted easily divisible cash rather than awkward reminders of the lost relative. In the past, Grandfather had jokingly called himself and the others who converged on such properties "vultures." The unwanted furniture would go to Wagner or Fischer, the carpets and rugs to Hersch or maybe Wolf, and so on. Most often, Grandfather's offer on the books would be the best and he would return with his cart laden, a modest private library sheltering beneath the tarps.

But such joking had long since been abandoned, now that the townsfolk were stirred up against the tribe, and more than ready to throw the word as an allegation rather than the self-deprecating label originally intended. Anne had grown up with dirty looks and name-calling in the school playground. She'd become used to attending the birthdays only of the children who shared her temple. But more recently it would be a stone that was thrown at her rather than merely unpleasant words.

She tried to tell herself that it was because she'd grown into a bigger target, almost a woman now, but the Wagners' children came back from lessons crying or bruised or both often as not. Her grandfather said that evil men sought to use any difference to create fear, distrust, and hatred, all of which they would employ to advance their own position.

Anne had often wondered at the contrast between the way mankind divided its books and the way they divided themselves. For the former, they looked beneath the cover and considered what was written there, finding shelves for histories, for romances, for biographies, and for mysteries. For people, each far more complex than even the most profound of books, the cover often served. They saw her hair, the shape of her face, and they knew exactly how she fitted into their lives, regardless of her character. She was beneath them, unclean, an intruder into the town where her forebears had lived for many generations.


Anne sat at the counter, the mechanical crank-operated cash register hulking in front of her. They didn’t need a register of course. The customers came in twos and threes, or more generally these days in ones, with long, silent gaps in between. But Grandfather had inherited the register from one of his uncles’ shops and installed it with an owner’s pride, insisting that it made the place look modern and busy, even though the device was the best part of fifty years old, and the shop was largely deserted.

Despite the family's business being concerned primarily with old books, their takings run through an ancient register, it was the future that fascinated Anne's grandfather. His favourite topic of conversation was the pace of change. He would list the things that filled Anne's world, and which were wholly absent from his own childhood. It wasn't, he insisted, that he was jealous of the marvels she now had access to, be it mechanical adding machines or lights that burst into life at the flick of a switch, but that he envied her the next fifty years. If technology had delivered so much over the course of his own life and was still accelerating, what wonders were to come?

A familiar but unexpected noise startled Anne from her thoughts, tumbling the neglected book in her hands to the dusty floorboards. She stood up sharply from her stool. She'd been on edge lately-well, more than lately-her nerves tight-strung. A glance at the windows showed a gloomy, rainswept street, empty save for a lone figure in a raincoat, bent against the wind, quickly gone from view. The board that covered the hole from last week's half-brick rattled in the wind. The cracks spread beyond the board, catching whatever light escaped the clouds, glimmering, letting her know that the violence couldn't just be covered up, promising more.

Anne tore her eyes from the street. The noise had come from back among the aisles. It had been the sound of a book hitting the ground, much like the sound her own book had made a few seconds later. Count them in-count them out. She had done just that and knew herself to be alone. But still a book had fallen.

"Hello?" Her voice sounded small. She coughed and tried again. "Hello!"

Nothing. Just the peculiar silence of books. Fresh rain suddenly pattered against the window, spattering the legend Hoffman's Books, the painted letters offered to her in reverse. It seemed too dark for barely after noon, even for November. The electric lights struggled to fill the space. Two bulbs had blown earlier in the month, filling some of the aisles with sharply drawn shadows.

Another soft noise from the rear of the shop. Not a book falling, not this time. The scuff of a shoe perhaps? Anne lifted the divider and came out from behind the desk. She'd asked her grandfather why the shelves weren't arranged in long straight lines. A brief walk across the storefront would reveal any intruder were that the case. Instead, the arrangement was closer to labyrinth than linear.

"Mystery!" had been the old man's answer. People want to get lost in a book, he said. Let them get lost in the act of finding one too. Add some wonder and excitement to that part of the process in order to remind them why they should part with both their coin and their time. Choosing a book should be a private business, conducted in the secrecy of the aisles, not on display for strangers' judgement.

Anne currently had very specific views on the value of mystery. She was against it. "Come out!"

The sudden jangle of the bell above the street door made her jump. She spun towards the entrance, feeling almost guilty, as if caught doing something she shouldn't have been.

A policeman stood there, rainwater dripping from his shoulder wrap and beading on the gleaming leather bill of his cap. He pushed the door closed with his heel, the bell's jangling intensifying again.

For a long moment he stood, taking in the store with a sliding gaze that slipped across Anne as if she were of no more interest than the furnishings.

"Can I help you, sir?" Anne didn't recognise the man. He was young, tall, clean-shaven. But for the close-set meanness of his eyes he might be handsome were he to smile. The shop's infrequent visits from the law usually came in the rather portly form of Officer Muller who would pop in every now and then on sunny days. Or used to. Anne hadn't seen him for maybe two years now. Grandfather said the man's superiors hadn't approved of his fraternising.

This new officer clearly hadn't come to chat, and his silence unnerved Anne. "Have you come about the window?"

The question made the man sneer. "If a broken window is the limit of your trouble, you will have done very well."

"It's against the law to-"

"The law is made to serve the people. And the people don't want your kind here." The officer snapped at her as if she were a child in class. He wouldn't use that tone if her grandfather was here, Anne was sure. Though it was her grandfather who had told her never to talk back to a policeman. He'd given her a lot of instructions lately. Stay behind the counter. Don't argue with customers. Don't leave the shop.

"Where is your father?" Cold blue eyes fixed her.

"He's dead, sir." Anne remembered that her grandfather had also told her to be scrupulously polite. "My grandfather runs the shop."

"And where is he?"

"Out on business, sir."

"Business . . ." The officer removed his cap. He had a blunt head, his fair hair cropped short. "With your sort that means stealing." He advanced on her, an unreadable malice in his stare.

Anne stood paralysed by indecision. She wanted to run for the security of the counter, however illusory that might be. But running from a policeman in her own shop would be silly. But then again, whatever his uniform promised, she could see that the man meant to hurt her in some manner.

"How long do you think you can last here?" His head tilted with the question, a smile edging thin lips. "They piled the books higher than a man in Babelplatz and burned them all. Degenerate filth!" His eyes swept the shelves, perhaps imagining a similar blaze here.

Anne cringed as the man loomed above her, standing far closer than a stranger should. He raised a gloved hand towards her face, and, hating herself for flinching before him, Anne found herself filled with a strong instinct to bite the reaching fingers. Instead, she turned her head away as he touched her hair.

"How old are-" His voice fell to nothing, and he took a sharp step backwards.

Anne turned in the direction of his stare, and also took a step away. The figure emerging from the aisles was both impossibly tall and somehow alien, as if perhaps a lion had taken to its hind legs and come in search of a good read. She blinked and saw that her eyes had deceived her. The man was merely outrageously tall, so tall that she shouldn't have been able to miss him among the bookshelves, but not so tall as to defy reason. And the mane was merely an unruly expanse of darkly curling hair falling to his shoulders.

"Is there a problem?" The stranger's voice rumbled out so deep that at first it seemed as if he were speaking a different language, but a moment later Anne's mind rotated the sounds into something that made sense.

"You're so tall!" Anne hadn't meant to say anything so stupid. The words had just fallen out of her open mouth. She belatedly remembered to close it. She opened it again. "I'm so sorry. You surprised me. Us." She glanced towards the policeman.

The officer had retreated another step, his amazement equal to hers. Now, realising himself the subject of scrutiny, he drew himself up to his full height, scowling. "Who are you? A gypsy?" Contempt shivered through his words. "Is the circus in town?"

The tall man's clothes certainly had an odd look to them, a patched leather waistcoat with metal buckles, trousers seemingly made the same way. He looked young but something gave his face a peculiar gravitas, as if a king in rags had stepped among them.

The stranger advanced and the policeman retreated, running out of places to go. "You seem angry, my friend."

"Who the hell-" The officer shook his head. "Papers! Show me your papers!"

The tall man made a strange crooning noise, dipping his shoulder in an odd manner. Anne, fascinated, couldn't take her eyes from him. He set an overlarge hand to the policeman's arm, just above the elbow. "Come."

Astonishingly, the policeman let himself be drawn away to the far side of the shop, the other man, head and shoulders above him, like a father leading an errant son. He kept talking the whole time, his voice so low and deep that Anne couldn't separate the words.

Freed from the stranger's hypnotic presence Anne glanced away towards the street, wishing her grandfather would come. For a moment she thought she saw him, ghostly through the rain, only to realise with a start that she was seeing the reflection of someone behind her.

She spun around to find that a second stranger had emerged from the aisles, this one short enough that she could believe him to have passed among them unseen. In his way, this other man was no less strange than the first. What she'd mis-seen as a charcoal grey robe was in fact a sensible business suit of the same colour. The dark grey only served to accentuate the unhealthy whiteness of his skin. Anne had read about the condition but had never seen someone who suffered from it.

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#Review - The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence #Fantasy #Romance

Series: The Library Trilogy # 2
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Release Date: April 9, 2024
Publisher: ACE
Source: Publisher
Genre: Fantasy / Romance

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 take 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.

“There is a book that is also a loop. A book that has swallowed its own tale. It is a ring, a cycle, burning through the years, spreading cracks through time, fissures that reach into its past and future. And through those cracks things that have no business in the world of flesh can escape.”

The Book That Broke the World, by Mark Lawrence, is the second installment in the author's The Library Trilogy. Key Characters: Evar, Livara, Arpix, Celcha, and Hellet. Long ago, a lie was told, and with the passing years it has grown and spread, a small push leading to a chain of desperate consequences. Now, as one edifice topples into the next with ever-growing violence, it threatens to break the world. 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.

Livira, who grew up in a place called The Dust, but was rescued by soldiers, is a librarian who trying to find her way home to her family, as well as find Evar. As the story opens, Livira and Malar (soldier) are together but nobody can see them because they are pretty much ghosts to everyone else. Livera is also trying to find a book she wrote, which could possibly be a true threat to the library’s existence. 

Evar, who was trapped with his adopted siblings for a very long time, was raised by the Assistant and Soldier who we learn are some characters we already know thanks to the Library's Mechanism of traveling through doors and different times and places. He, along with his warrior sister Clovis is determined to find Livira. Clovis is an amazing and tough warrior, but curiously finds herself falling for the human boy Aprix who once trained Livara even though they are different species. 

Celcha was born into slavery along with her brother Hellet. Their job was to dig into a lost city to find lost books. er as they head into the Library world. It appears that Hellet was being tempted by either ghosts or angels into doing something dangerous that would eventually lead to the destruction of the city that exists outside of the Library. The most curious aspect of Celcha was that she was pushed into doing something really awful, and wasn't aware that she was being used by people who wanted to destroy the Library. 

Arpix is a librarian who also tutored Livira. He and other survivors ended up in the Dust where Livira once lived, and it seems that they have been there for a while. Wentworth (a huge cat, who can find anyone), was a terrific addition to the book. Especially after you learn that he has been providing much needed food for Arpix and his group as well as fighting monsters called Skeers.

Behind the scenes, there is a war brewing. A war that has been thousands of years in the making thanks to two brothers. It is at this point I shall just say that the key characters must now decide which side they are on, and which doorway they will take to meet their own fates including fighting a cannibalistic King, and the rotten to the core Lord Algar who really truly hates Livara. 

*Facts* The Library Trilogy revolves around the Athenaeum, the legendary library instituted by Irad, the grandson of Cain and the great-grandson of Adam and Eve. Following the family tradition, Irad argued bitterly with his own brother, Jaspeth, who believed Irad’s library to be a temple glorifying the original sin of knowledge and was determined to tear it down. The Library has become a literal and figurative battleground over who controls access to knowledge or whether information should be passed down at all. The Library Trilogy is about many things: adventure, discovery, and romance, but it's also a love letter to books and the places where they live. The focus is on one vast and timeless library, but the love expands to encompass smaller more personal collections, and bookshops of all shades too. 

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