Book #19 of 2023: Ink and Bone (The Great Library Book 1)

Current theme: Things on the cover with wings. The edition I read had a pen with butterfly wings around it, but I couldn't find a copy of that online.

Ink and Bone (The Great Library Book 1) by Rachel Caine.

This may be the fastest I've read a book since I was a teenager with much better eyes and a stronger body. The book was nine and a half hours long, and I finished it in under a day. I read laying down in bed, and so the last 40% of the book went slower, because I just couldn't take all those hours in bed. And oh the eye strain...

Plot: Imagine a world where the library was the most powerful thing on the planet. It can destroy a country if needed.

The Great Library in Alexandria in Egypt was the center of power in this steampunk world. It was mostly a realistic world, just enough steampunk to make the whole premise work.

As powerful as the Library is, many people want to work for it (and it has all sorts of roles, from police/army to alchemists to scholars to the rare kind of person who has the power to make steampunk things function).

The main character of the story is a second son of a family that deals in black market books (a crime that if caught would lead to torture and execution). The father sends the son (Jess) to work for the library so the family can get inside information.

Jess and about a dozen other young-ish people (about 20 years old) are in this class of people who made it through the testing and such to now directly compete for one of six open positions.

All that sounds exciting enough, but that's just the beginning. This group and their teacher end up going into a war zone and getting into the middle of even worse political warfare.

As exciting as the plot and story were, what I really liked was all the characters. Major or minor, all of them were interesting, complex people with thoughts and goals of their own. All of them were flawed in some way, and most of them had secrets.

It's been a long, long time since a book hooked me from the first page. I'm really happy there are four more books in this series, and I hope I like them as much as I did this one. Even if I do like them as much, I'm going to have to slow down my reading. Ten extra hours in bed sounds good, but it's really hard on my back and legs, and my eyes are really tired.