Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

(I put the "cover theme" project on hold until I finish this series... but this book does have things with wings on the cover anyway.)

Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2) by Rachel Caine. I'll try to put any spoilers for book 1 behind a spoiler cut.

Rachel Caine usually writes romance and YA books, but you would never know that based on book 1. Book 2, however, felt like a YA book to me.

The plot took off right from where book 1 ended. The Great Library is the biggest power in the entire world, nearly every country in the world is loyal to it. Most people on the planet think that books (knowledge) are worth more than any one person's life. Surprise, surprise, turns out the Great Library is actually evil. Which is sad, I had liked the story better before we knew that, but I guess "benevolent superpower takes good care of the people" isn't much of a plot.

Book 1 ended with Thomas assumedly dead, so book 2 started right away with that: Turns out he was not dead, just in the deepest, darkest prison.

That's kind of where things felt like they were headed off into YA land. You have a small group of young people (early 20s, but I couldn't help but read them as teenagers, I'm not sure why) and they were going to take on the strongest force on the planet, the Library.

All the spoiler text probably makes this annoying to read, so I'll leave my summary of the plot there. A lot of things happened, but this very much felt like "second book of five" -- a lot of things happened, but it felt like a stepping stone along a larger plot.

One of my biggest issues of the book was the relationships. At one point the main character (Jess) thought to himself that he loved another character. That made me stop and blink, because there had been no signs before that. Sure they liked each other, but they could have been friends, love is a big step. At another point, Jess said his best friend was another character, and I had the same reaction: I knew they were friends, but there had been no signs they were best friends. The two things felt very "tell, don't show"-y.

All in all though, even though it wasn't anywhere near as good as book 1, it was still a fun book. When I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about reading it and wanting to read it, and that's a (sadly) rare reaction from me.

I'm sad to say I found out the author died two years ago. I wish I had found her earlier, so I could have sent her a message telling her how much I enjoyed her books.

Edit: I had a moment of panic that maybe book 5 wasn't actually the end of the series, maybe she hadn't had a chance to finish it. But she did, the series ended with it in 2019.

Edit 2: Now that I can read reviews, I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one having a hard time seeing the characters as adults. Most other reviews called them "teenagers" or "the kids".