The Book That Wouldn’t Burn is a book I picked up after a lot of people were hyping it up when they saw it during my TikTok Lives. Mark Lawrence is an author I’ve seen a lot of and have been interested in picking up for quite some time so I was excited to get into The Book That Wouldn’t Burn – especially knowing it had a sequel too (love a series).
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The Book That Wouldn’t Burn tells the intertwining stories of Liviria and Evar. Two young people who have never really meant anything to the world and who both live incredibly different worlds. Via the mediums of portals, they end up visiting times and worlds in their universe which begin to show them more than they’d thought possible about various timelines and various histories.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn plot – 4/5
Now, I’ve got to be honest here – The Book That Wouldn’t Burn started off exactly as I like fantasy books to start – cool new creatures, a clear enemy and a clear goody. However, it quickly dissolved into quite a convoluted and confusing mix of both genres and ideas.
The general premise behind it is that our two main characters stumble upon ways to travel through time and space – though this is all set in a fantasy setting, so it’s never a sci-fi setting – in fact a lot of the travel involves places they’re very aware of or become aware of quickly.
For both of them, this travel is done via different means – a point that they note to each other during the book actually. This all sounds well and cool but I’ll be honest, I lost a lot of interest in their travel. It didn’t seem, for a long time, that the places they were travelling to had much purpose and it all felt a little disjointed. It does sort of all come together at the end and have a purpose eventually but it really lost my interest from about 20-70% of the way through the book.
I must also make a remark on Lawrence’s writing. I’ve seen Lawrence’s tweets and his website, so when I started this and it was incredibly formal and full of superfluous language, it was a little off-putting and surprising. I wanted a slightly easier and more comical read – more akin to Joe Abercrombie.
The reason I’ve not “review-bombed” the plot is because as a complete package it was really interesting and the final 150 pages of the book were exactly what I’d wanted all along. Without spoiling too much, the final 150 pages are the only reason I would consider reading the sequel.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn characters – 4.25/5
One reason I get excited to read authors is usually because of their personalities on social media. If they’ve got a dark or blunt sense of humour to their posts, I absolutely know they’re going to write some good characters in their books. It’s no secret that people with big personalities in real life tend to write great characters (in my opinion anyway).
Therefore, I wasn’t surprised that there were a good number of characters in this book who were brilliant. One of whom (and I won’t spoil who) is one of those big brutish characters who you love because of the way he treats some people and the way he treats others. A scary individual but only to those who they need to be (we’ve all read characters like them before, but I still love it).
The two main protagonists had just about enough personality for me to like them. They didn’t suffer too much from main-character syndrome (where their personalities lack because they simply serve as vessels to the plot).
I knew Lawrence’s books would have characters worth reading about and that was definitely true here.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn final rating – 4.25/5
I wouldn’t necessarily say that The Book That Wouldn’t Burn lived up to the hype I was hoping for but it’s an ambitious book with big ideas and great characters. Lawrence’s writing was a little off-putting for me at first but once I was into the flow of it it wasn’t much of an issue. A confusing middle was book-ended by a brilliant start and ending that have me intrigued enough to want to read the sequel.
Pick up a copy of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn from Amazon
