Rachel Caine rocks the planet with Ink and Bone! Review time!

I tore through this story, not quickly, but with this hunger to be in the middle of Jess's world, to be inside his head and know the people around him. From the beginning your heart will pound. Even as a young kid his introspection crawled into my heart and took over. The world is an alternative here-and-now with this all-seeing, all-knowing Library that controls all information, even controls how, when, and where you have access to it. You can imagine not everyone liked that plan for society. So there are your activists, the Burners. Then you have the black market traders who like that plan because it's their bread and butter. The idealists are a danger to everyone, especially themselves. The bad guys range in degrees. But throughout there was this creeping dread that no one had it right yet. The Burners have some thoughts on the right track, but mostly they are a bunch of crazies. The Library scholars live in golden towers far removed from the real world. The young idealists who desperately want to become scholars fight to serve the Library, but fight even harder to hold onto their long held vision of an ideal run amuck.

Rachel Caine's Ink and Bone had a very Orwellian vibe all the way down to the feeling that this could have been performed over the radio with static and voices that drew you in. There was also a steampunk slash hopeless dystopian feel. The world building was phenomenal. The characters will be with me...forever. I'm hooked.

On a book girl side note, I remember reading an emotional post from Rachel Caine years ago about censorship. I think it was in response to hate mail or some internet troll and when I started reading Ink and Bone I thought of my walkaway feelings from that post of Caine's, that any kind of censorship is a suffocating band around freedom. She didn't say it like that, but I had to breathe deeply after reading it. If I was a betting girl I'd say Caine spun those feelings until an amazing intricate world was formed and created Ink and Bone.