Review: The Book That Broke the World, by Mark Lawrence

The Book That Broke the World is high fantasy and a direct sequel to The Book That Wouldn't Burn. You should not start here. In a delightful break from normal practice, the author provides a useful summary of the previous volume at the start of this book to jog your memory.

At the end of The Book That Wouldn't Burn, the characters were scattered and in various states of corporeality after some major revelations about the nature of the Library and the first appearance of the insectile Skeer. The Book That Wouldn't Burn picks up where it left off, and there is a lot more contact with the Skeer, but my guess that they would be the next viewpoint characters does not pan out. Instead, we get a new group and a new protagonist: Celcha, whose sees angels who come to visit her brother.

I have complaints, but before I launch into those, I should say that I liked this book apart from the totally unnecessary cannibalism. (I'll get to that.) Livira is a bit sidelined, which is regrettable, but Celcha and her brother are interesting new characters, and both Arpix and Clovis, supporting characters in the first book, get some excellent character development. Similar to the first book, this is a puzzle box story full of world-building tidbits with intellectually-satisfying interactions. Lawrence elaborates and complicates his setting in ways that don't contradict earlier parts of the story but create more room and depth for the characters to be creative. I came away still invested in this world and eager to find out how Lawrence pulls the world-building and narrative threads together.

The biggest drawback of this book is that it's not new. My thought after finishing the first book of the series was that if Lawrence had enough world-building ideas to fill three books to that same level of density, this had the potential of being one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. By the end of the second book, I concluded that this is not the case. Instead of showing us new twists and complications the way the first book did throughout, The Book That Broke the World mostly covers the same thematic ground from some new angles. It felt like Lawrence was worried the reader of the first book may not have understood the theme or the world-building, so he spent most of the second book nailing down anything that moved.

I found that frustrating. One of the best parts of The Book That Wouldn't Burn was that Lawrence trusted the reader to keep up, which for me hit the glorious but rare sweet spot of pacing where I was figuring out the world at roughly the same pace as the characters. It surprised me in some very enjoyable ways. The Book That Broke the World did not surprise me. There are a few new things, which I enjoyed, and a few elaborations and developments of ideas, which I mostly enjoyed, but I saw the big plot twist coming at least fifty pages before it happened and found the aftermath more annoying than revelatory. It doesn't help that the plot rests on character misunderstandings, one of my least favorite tropes.

One of the other disappointments of this book is that the characters stop using the Library as a library. The Library at the center of this series is a truly marvelous piece of world-building with numerous fascinating features that are unrelated to its contents, but Livira used it first and foremost as a repository of books. The first book was full of characters solving problems by finding a relevant book and reading it.

In The Book That Broke the World, sadly, this is mostly gone. The Library is mostly reduced to a complicated Big Dumb Object setting. It's still a delightful bit of world-building, and we learn about a few new features, but I only remember two places where the actual books are important to the story. Even the book referenced in the title is mostly important as an artifact with properties unrelated to the words that it contains or to the act of reading it. I think this is a huge lost opportunity and something I hope Lawrence fixes in the last book of the trilogy.

This book instead focuses on the politics around the existence of the Library itself. Here I'm cautiously optimistic, although a lot is going to depend on the third book. Lawrence has set up a three-sided argument between groups that I will uncharitably describe as the libertarian techbros, the "burn it all down" reactionaries, and the neoliberal centrist technocrats. All three of those positions suck, and Lawrence had better be setting the stage for Livira to find a different path. Her unwillingness to commit to any of those sides gives me hope, but bringing this plot to a satisfying conclusion is going to be tricky. I hope I like what Lawrence comes up with, but it feels far from certain.

It doesn't help that he's started delivering some points with a sledgehammer, and that's where we get to the unnecessary cannibalism. Thankfully this is a fairly small part of the tail end of the book, but it was an unpleasant surprise that I did not want in this novel and that I don't think made the story any better.

It's tempting to call the cannibalism gratuitous, but it does fit one of the main themes of this story, namely that humans are depressingly good at using any rule-based object in unexpected and nasty ways that are contrary to the best intentions of the designer. This is the fundamental challenge of the Library as a whole and the question that I suspect the third book will be devoted to addressing, so I understand why Lawrence wanted to emphasize his point. The reason why there is cannibalism here is directly related to a profound misunderstanding of the properties of the library, and I detected an echo of one of C.S. Lewis's arguments in The Last Battle about the nature of Hell.

The problem, though, is that this is Satanic baby-killerism, to borrow a term from Fred Clark. There are numerous ways to show this type of perversion of well-intended systems, which I know because Lawrence used other ones in the first book that were more subtle but equally effective. One of the best parts of The Book That Wouldn't Burn is that there were few real villains. The conflict was structural, all sides had valid perspectives, and the ethical points of that story were made with some care and nuance.

The problem with cannibalism as it's used here is not merely that it's gross and disgusting and off-putting to the reader, although it is all of those things. If I wanted to read horror, I would read horror novels. I don't appreciate surprise horror used for shock value in regular fantasy. But worse, it's an abandonment of moral nuance. The function of cannibalism in this story is like the function of Satanic baby-killers: it's to signal that these people are wholly and irredeemably evil. They are the Villains, they are Wrong, and they cease to be characters and become symbols of what the protagonists are fighting. This is destructive to the story because it's designed to provoke a visceral short-circuit in the reader and let the author get away with sloppy story-telling. If the author needs to use tactics like this to point out who is the villain, they have failed to set up their moral quandary properly.

The worst part is that this was entirely unnecessary because Lawrence's story-telling wasn't sloppy and he set up his moral quandary just fine. No one was confused about the ethical point here. I as the reader was following without difficulty, and had appreciated the subtlety with which Lawrence posed the question. But apparently he thought he was too subtle and decided to come back to the point with a pile-driver. I think that seriously injured the story. The ethical argument here is much more engaging and thought-provoking when it's more finely balanced.

That's a lot of complaints, mostly because this is a good book that I badly wanted to be a great book but which kept tripping over its own feet. A lot of trilogies have weak second books. Hopefully this is another example of the mid-story sag, and the finale will be worthy of the start of the story. But I have to admit the moral short-circuiting and the de-emphasis of the actual books in the library has me a bit nervous. I want a lot out of the third book, and I hope I'm not asking this author for too much.

If you liked the first book, I think you'll like this one too, with the caveat that it's quite a bit darker and more violent in places, even apart from the surprise cannibalism. But if you've not started this series, you may want to wait for the third book to see if Lawrence can pull off the ending.

Followed by The Book That Held Her Heart, currently scheduled for publication in April of 2025.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: The Wings Upon Her Back, by Samantha Mills

The Wings Upon Her Back is a political steampunk science fantasy novel. If the author's name sounds familiar, it may be because Samantha Mills's short story "Rabbit Test" won Nebula, Locus, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards. This is her first novel.

Winged Zemolai is a soldier of the mecha god and the protege of Mecha Vodaya, the Voice. She has served the city-state of Radezhda by defending it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, for twenty-six years. Despite that, it takes only a moment of errant mercy for her entire life to come crashing down. On a whim, she spares a kitchen worker who was concealing a statue of the scholar god, meaning that he was only pretending to worship the worker god like all workers should. Vodaya is unforgiving and uncompromising, as is the sleeping mecha god. Zemolai's wings are ripped from her back and crushed in the hand of the god, and she's left on the ground to die of mechalin withdrawal.

The Wings Upon Her Back is told in two alternating timelines. The main one follows Zemolai after her exile as she is rescued by a young group of revolutionaries who think she may be useful in their plans. The other thread starts with Zemolai's childhood and shows the reader how she became Winged Zemolai: her scholar family, her obsession with flying, her true devotion to the mecha god, and the critical early years when she became Vodaya's protege. Mills maintains the separate timelines through the book and wraps them up in a rather neat piece of symbolic parallelism in the epilogue.

I picked up this book on a recommendation from C.L. Clark, and yes, indeed, I can see why she liked this book. It's a story about a political awakening, in which Zemolai slowly realizes that she has been manipulated and lied to and that she may, in fact, be one of the baddies. The Wings Upon Her Back is more personal than some other books with that theme, since Zemolai was specifically (and abusively) groomed for her role by Vodaya. Much of the book is Zemolai trying to pull out the hooks that Vodaya put in her or, in the flashback timeline, the reader watching Vodaya install those hooks.

The flashback timeline is difficult reading. I don't think Mills could have left it out, but she says in the afterword that it was the hardest part of the book to write and it was also the hardest part of the book to read. It fills in some interesting bits of world-building and backstory, and Mills does a great job pacing the story revelations so that both threads contribute equally, but mostly it's a story of manipulative abuse. We know from the main storyline that Vodaya's tactics work, which gives those scenes the feel of a slow-motion train wreck. You know what's going to happen, you know it will be bad, and yet you can't look away.

It occurred to me while reading this that Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory told a similar type of story without the flashback structure, which eliminates the stifling feeling of inevitability. I don't think that would not have worked for this story. If you simply rearranged the chapters of The Wings Upon Her Back into a linear narrative, I would have bailed on the book. Watching Zemolai being manipulated would have been too depressing and awful for me to make it to the payoff without the forward-looking hope of the main timeline. It gave me new appreciation for the difficulty of what Tesh pulled off.

Mills uses this interwoven structure well, though. At about 90% through this book I had no idea how it could end in the space remaining, but it reaches a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Mills uses a type of ending that normally bothers me, but she does it by handling the psychological impact so well that I couldn't help but admire it. I'm avoiding specifics because I think it worked better when I wasn't expecting it, but it ties beautifully into the thematic point of the book.

I do have one structural objection, though. It's one of those problems I didn't notice while reading, but that started bothering me when I thought back through the story from a political lens. The Wings Upon Her Back is Zemolai's story, her redemption arc, and that means she drives the plot. The band of revolutionaries are great characters (particularly Galiana), but they're supporting characters. Zemolai is older, more experienced, and knows critical information they don't have, and she uses it to effectively take over. As setup for her character arc, I see why Mills did this. As political praxis, I have issues.

There is a tendency in politics to believe that political skill is portable and repurposable. Converting opposing operatives to the cause is welcomed not only because they indicate added support, but also because they can use their political skill to help you win instead. To an extent this is not wrong, and is probably the most true of combat skills (which Zemolai has in abundance). But there's an underlying assumption that politics is symmetric, and a critical reason why I hold many of the political positions that I do hold is that I don't think politics is symmetric.

If someone has been successfully stoking resentment and xenophobia in support of authoritarians, converts to an anti-authoritarian cause, and then produces propaganda stoking resentment and xenophobia against authoritarians, this is in some sense an improvement. But if one believes that resentment and xenophobia are inherently wrong, if one's politics are aimed at reducing the resentment and xenophobia in the world, then in a way this person has not truly converted. Worse, because this is an effective manipulation tactic, there is a strong tendency to put this type of political convert into a leadership position, where they will, intentionally or not, start turning the anti-authoritarian movement into a copy of the authoritarian movement they left. They haven't actually changed their politics because they haven't understood (or simply don't believe in) the fundamental asymmetry in the positions. It's the same criticism that I have of realpolitik: the ends do not justify the means because the means corrupt the ends.

Nothing that happens in this book is as egregious as my example, but the more I thought about the plot structure, the more it bothered me that Zemolai never listens to the revolutionaries she joins long enough to wrestle with why she became an agent of an authoritarian state and they didn't. They got something fundamentally right that she got wrong, and perhaps that should have been reflected in who got to make future decisions. Zemolai made very poor choices and yet continues to be the sole main character of the story, the one whose decisions and actions truly matter. Maybe being wrong about everything should be disqualifying for being the main character, at least for a while, even if you think you've understood why you were wrong.

That problem aside, I enjoyed this. Both timelines were compelling and quite difficult to put down, even when they got rather dark. I could have done with less body horror and a few fewer fight scenes, but I'm glad I read it.

Science fiction readers should be warned that the world-building, despite having an intricate and fascinating surface, is mostly vibes. I started the book wondering how people with giant metal wings on their back can literally fly, and thought the mentions of neural ports, high-tech materials, and immune-suppressing drugs might mean that we'd get some sort of explanation. We do not: heavier-than-air flight works because it looks really cool and serves some thematic purposes. There are enough hints of technology indistinguishable from magic that you could make up your own explanations if you wanted to, but that's not something this book is interested in. There's not a thing wrong with that, but don't get caught by surprise if you were in the mood for a neat scientific explanation of apparent magic.

Recommended if you like somewhat-harrowing character development with a heavy political lens and steampunk vibes, although it's not the sort of book that I'd press into the hands of everyone I know. The Wings Upon Her Back is a complete story in a single novel.

Content warning: the main character is a victim of physical and emotional abuse, so some of that is a lot. Also surgical gore, some torture, and genocide.

Rating: 7 out of 10