Livira is a young girl raised in a desert village outside of the city that houses The Library, and while she is intelligent, that skill doesn't seem to find much exercise in The Dust, the term for the dried lakebed that surrounds her village. When her village is attacked by a bestial race called Sabbers, and the children are carried away, Livira's only hope is in a group of soldiers that takes down the Sabber raiding party while they are taking Livira and her friends across The Dust.
Upon being rescued, Livira is brought to the city and she and her surviving friends are sent to find work in order to be fed and housed. While it appears that Livira is fated to muck out stables for the rest of her life, her intelligence is quickly noticed by a high ranking member of The Library and Livira soon finds herself a trainee in the prestigious institute.
Evar, on the other hand, couldn't have a more different life. Living in a time centuries after Livira's own life, he and his siblings live within a single chamber of The Library. While this chamber is miles to a side, Evar can't help but feel imprisoned by the walls and ceiling that enclose his life. Evar and his siblings have spent the past decade or so in this chamber with only each other and two constructs as company. The Assistant is modeled after a woman and seems to have vast knowledge of the books in The Library (though she will often choose to only reveal what she sees fit) and The Soldier helps to protect the siblings from dark monsters that occasionally appear from the device at the center of their chamber known as The Mechanism.
The Mechanism itself is an important part in Evar's family's life. The Mechanism allows someone to bring in a book and experience the contents of that book as if they were living it. While most of the time the experience is fulfilling, on rare occasions, the person that enters The Mechanism doesn't return. Such was the case of Evar, as well as the other four people he calls his siblings. While Evar and the others had entered into The Mechanism at different times, sometimes generations apart, they all came out at the same time. None of them have aged a day and all but Evar had the contents of the book they carried in with them imprinted on their souls.
While Evar's brothers and sister became experts in everything from history to war to psychology and assassination, Evar isn't even sure what book he had with him when he went into The Mechanism. What Evar does have, though, is the certainty that he left someone in trouble and he has a strong desire to get himself and his siblings out of The Library, though when pressed, he isn't even sure why.
Evar's life ends up getting turned upside down when he finds a strange book in the chamber. Given that the massive room is filled with thousands of books piled up high in every direction, finding a book is hardly unusual. The fact that it is not only written in a language he doesn't know (despite a lot of education from The Assistant), but that he can somehow actually read it causes him to pause. When a note scribbled in that language on the first page calls him out by name and tells him to not read the book, but to seek out the author instead, he can't help but be curious.
Evar's attempts to learn more about this strange book lead him to a part of The Library he has never known before. Considering he has spent the last decade in the same room, that's quite a feat. Evar finds himself in a strange land filled with pools of water in a grid-like pattern, a place he eventually learns is called The Exchange, and it's a place where someone can visit not only other time periods, but also other worlds.
Meanwhile (a word that isn't really applicable, but I'm going to use it here), Livira's time as a Library Trainee not only has her excel in her studies, but also in trouble as she is a very unorthodox student. While her intellect makes her great at her studies, the prevailing belief that anyone from The Dust is of a lower class makes her success something frowned upon by many. Livira often finds herself having to fight uphill where many trainees are simply accepted. As if dealing with all of that isn't enough, Livira's own life takes another unexpected turn when she also finds herself in The Exchange, where she meets a young man named Evar.
The two quickly become friends as they try to learn the rules of this strange inbetween world, and while they keep ending up separated, they meet time and time again over the years. While Evar continues to hunt down the author of his book, Livira finds herself dealing with the growing violence in the city around The Library. It's becoming more and more clear that the cycle of violence that surrounds The Library is reaching its next crescendo. What was once Sabbers' raiding parties like the one that displaced Livira as a child is growing to an all-out siege of the city.
The Book That Wouldn't Burn was a fun ride from start to finish. Not only was the world-building great, but the two central characters were relatable and believable. While I had my suspicions about some final twists, and they ended up being correct, those revelations ended up only being the tip of the iceberg for how this first installment in The Library Trilogy wrapped up. I found the final third of the book something that I simply couldn't stop reading as the various pieces of the plot started falling into place and, given how everything fell together, I simply can't wait to see what happens next.
