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The greater tragedy of our world is not the victims of cruelty, but that so many of those victims would, given the opportunity, stand in the shoes of their oppressors and wield the same whip with equal enthusiasm.

Mark Lawrence continues his wonderful story of the Library that serves as a “universal memory��, that can be accessed easily after we “obliterate ourselves, which is something we appear to do on a regular basis as soon as we discover the means to do it efficiently." On the other side of this equation stand those who believe the library should be destroyed and that we should be forced to “start from scratch�� each time we destroy our civilizations. In the middle ground are those few who believe a reasonable compromise would be saving the library but limiting its access to a selected few…The Librarians.

The wisdom to use knowledge must be earned rather than given. That takes time. Lifetimes. Millennia. Knowledge without wisdom is fire in the hands of children.

This story is told through a mixture of characters from multiple species that have access to and have had dominion over the library at some point in time.

The species all use the term Sabbers for their enemies, and the sabbers change as the point of view in the story changes. And isn’t that one of our universal truths? Hard to know who the bad guy is sometimes.

There are some who have literally spent their entire lives in a section of the library, unable to open the doors because each door can only be opened by a particular species and sometimes the next door for your species is 200 miles away, and its in a different section. And there are some who have come to the library because they had nothing left, their community was slaughtered by the sabbers.

All these inter-mingled stories. Stories full of relatable truths. Love, and belonging, hate and revenge. Those who are only interested in destroying and those only interested in preserving. All of these stories told around the framework of a library that holds all the books in all the languages of all the worlds that touch this one and the dimensions bordering this one.

Like many, I am always cautious of the “second book syndrome�� of a trilogy. The first book in this trilogy, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was a masterpiece of fantasy writing and I am very happy to tell you, this book is too.

Note: along the way, Mark Lawrence gives you bits and pieces of what it like to be an author: One of the characters has written a book.

“a kind of immortality, that they would outlast her flesh and wait out the millennia on library shelves, occasionally being discovered and rediscovered by intrepid explorers. Maybe her ideas would even find another mind in which they echoed and took on weight as the reader wrapped pieces of his own soul around the pieces of hers that rested on the page��

I had the very wonderful experience of buddy reading this with Sara