The Book That Held Her Heart (The Library Trilogy book 3) by Mark Lawrence (book review).
Livira has spent centuries fighting for the library and for her relationship with Evar. Or years. Or both. It’s become hard to tell. She is fighting still. Her band of friends has splintered into three factions: to fix the library, to destroy the library or to find some compromise that they can all accept. Everything hinges upon her book that is cracking the foundations of the library and rules of time and space. Now all she has to do is find it first.
‘The Book That Held Her Heart’, the third book in ‘The Library’ series, begins in a place I did not expect. We find ourselves in what seems to be our world, in a small bookshop in a small town in Germany in the late 1930s. Not where we left off, with our heroes jumping through a portal into the unknown to escape the clutches of their enemies. After the frenetic pace of the series up to this point, it was a strangely tranquil moment, even knowing what happened at that time in history. Oddly, it brings the Library’s world into ours, where only one moon exists and no other race can build a robot army. For just one example. This brings all of the broader issues that author Mark Lawrence puts amid his warring species and political intrigues right into the foreground that coloured the rest of the book for me.
‘The Book That Held Her Heart’ continues with its breakneck pace with short chapters and abrupt jumps to other characters’ points of view. We have a host of characters that split up through not only time and space but also versions of reality. Possibly. Or maybe the same reality. It’s hard to tell. Because, really, what is reality? What is truth? What are words? This novel doesn’t draw the reader along for the ride. You’re either coming along or you are left behind. There are epic battles, kings, assassins, robot insects from the moon, immortal mentors and young lovers, and there is also the library and its words. Their power. As a reader, I was just holding on as concepts and plots blurred past. There is just so much going on that the only way to read the book is to let it wash over you and experience it, leaving the thinking for later.
It’s hard to know what to compare this series to. If it was entirely set in the Library, I would directly compare it to Erin Morgenstern’s ‘The Starless Sea’, but it’s different to that. Perhaps Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Book Of The New Sun’, with its liberal dose of science fiction tempering the fantasy, is a suitable comparison. But again, Lawrence has created something different. ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ by Ursula Le Guin has a similar vibe, as does Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, but both novels take a near(ish) future approach to seeing where our current society might go. Lawrence takes all of these things and jams them together in ‘The Library Trilogy’. There is no gentle leading by the hand through the plot into a lesson on the dangers and wonders of knowledge that we could see in our world once we look up. This series puts that lesson here and now and also in the book, all at once.
This series is a love affair with the written word and its power over people and societies. Do I love it? No, but I did give it to a friend for Christmas just so I could talk about it with them. Now that the whole series is done, I am going to sit and binge on all three books and think it over. I may never read them again, but I need to go through them back-to-back at least once to get everything lined up in my head. These books have a lot going on in the plot and everything that leads to it. The power of fiction, the need to question and explore knowledge. If you want a book that makes you think, that can lead to bigger questions and broader discussions, then try this one out.
LK Richardson
April 2025
(pub: ACE, 2025. 384 page hardback. Price: $30.00 (US). ISBN: 978-0-59343-797-1)
check our website: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690453/the-book-that-held-her-heart-by-mark-lawrence/
