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338 pages, Hardcover
First published July 11, 2017
🌹 JESS is the main character & narrator, and he’s actually kind of bland compared to the other characters. But he’s still an extremely likeable character so there’s not really a problem??
🌷 MORGAN is the love interest and the Chosen One Who Wants To Save Everyone But Also Is Extremely Selfish At Times. (I didn’t like her very much in this one.)
🌹 KHALILA is one of the most bada*s female characters I’ve come across, and??? SHE’S A HIJABI. I’m not Muslim, but I know how important it is for my Muslim friends to see hijabis in fantasy!! There’s one scene in this book that I absolutely LOVE her for?? It doesn’t affect the plot at all, but I’ll put it in spoilers just in case (but it’s really not a spoiler):
🌷 DARIO is like the forever frenemy of Jess, and while I had trouble really gaining a liking for him in the first book, and then liking him again after the second book, I do think he’s a very well fleshed out character. He’s also from Spain!!
🌹 GLAIN is the strictest, I-show-no-emotion-because-I-probably-don’t-have-any-emotions soldier fighter girl from Wales ever??? But she’s so LIKEABLE.
(Don’t click on this unless you’ve read the second book!!)
"To all those who face change with fear. Go forward.
To the ever-transforming glory of the public library, without which we would all be diminished.
No one with a book if ever alone, even in the darkest moments.
We are all book lovers.
And we all chase the Great Library of Alexandria, one book at a time."
"When all the world is a lock, boy, you don't make a key. You become a key."
"Our words must live after us, if we are to lift ourselves up."
"I intend for the Great Library to become more than mere knowledge. I intend for it to use both pen and sword."
“Only cowards are so afraid of a scrap of cloth,” she said, clear enough to carry to the stands. There was a shimmer in her eyes: anger, not tears. “We may not agree with the Archivist; we may want to see him gone and better Scholars take his place. But we still stand for knowledge. You stand for nothing.”
“Stop thinking like a lovestruck idiot; she’s a weapon. She can build us a channel to communicate with your brother. Let her do the job she needs to do, all right?”
He turned toward her. Hands out of his pockets, body set as if he expected her to attack. He saw her shift to match it. It was probably unconscious. Probably. “I’m not willing to break her to serve the rest of us. We do that, we’re no better than the Archivist.”
Glain’s expression didn’t shift. It was calm and set and confident. “Flavia chose to pick up the knife.”
“Flavia stood on the corpses of everyone who died first trying to protect her. So think about that a moment.” His tone had gone so hard, cold, and final that he scarcely believed it was his.
“Flavia was a child,” Glain said. “And you don’t have a moral right to treat Morgan as one!”
“No one with a book is ever alone, even in the darkest moments.”
"When I returned from my assignment I found Chris gone, with all his work. You know the rest."
The rest: imprisonment, torture, erasure from the records of the Library- for a Scholar of Wolfe's caliber, it was the assassination of immortality, the burning of a life's work, and for what? For being brilliant. For being exactly what the Library stood for in the first place.
"What do you want me to say? It's a cell. There's nothing in here."
"Dario, you're hopeless," Wolfe said. "Jess. Tell him how he's wrong."
"Strip the netting under the mattresses. Braid it together, tie it to the window bars, ant twist...You can use it for a tool, sharpen it up as a weapon..."
"I mean to. Each one of you deserves the truth and is strong enough to stand up under the weight. I have known many Scholars and students. I have never met a more unruly, unteachable lot, and I thank the gods for forcing you all into my lives."
Wolfe's words were severe, but the look in his eyes, the quiet smile-those were anything but.