The Book That Held Her Heart: Concludes a trilogy that’s easy to recommend

The Book That Held Her Heart by Mark Lawrence

Mark Lawrence’s first title in his LIBRARY TRILOGY, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, made my Top Ten Books list the year it came out (2023), and while its sequel, The Book That Broke the World, wasn’t as strong, I still quite enjoyed it. Now Lawrence is out with The Book That Held Her Heart, and while it certainly works as a conclusion — resolving the story’s major conflict in mostly effective fashion and doing so in  an often moving manner — it was the least successful of the three titles for me on a novel level.

I’m going to assume you’ve read the first two, so I’m not going to bother with a recap save of the very end of book two (thus, spoilers ahead). That novel ended with our main group of characters splitting up into three groups, each of which exited the time-and-space spanning Library via one of three portals. Livira’s group ended up thousands of years in the past, where she eventually meets up with her friend Carlotte, who has been living there for a while as a ghost (characters in their past cannot be seen and cannot touch anything). Evar’s group, which included his siblings Mayland (sworn to destroy the Library), Starval, and Clovis, eventually land in the Vaults, a great space beneath the Library where stories end up. Finally, Kerrol and Yute end up in 1930s Germany, where they befriend a young Jewish girl named Anne. Meanwhile, the Librarian Arpix (also Clovis’ lover) and several other friends of Liviras are stuck in the Library, having been captured by the appalling King Oanold.

Thus the characters have several plots/goals. One is the ultimate one of the trilogy: resolve the aeons’ old war over what to do about the Library: destroy it in hopes of disrupting the cycle of violence, cruelty, and fall of civilizations that has persisted throughout history or save it as the last hope of breaking the cycle by an accumulation of learning (and ideally, wisdom). The key artifact in this quest is Livira’s book, which has the ability to destroy the Library (whether it can also save it is a more open question). Another goal is obviously to find each other once again and reunite siblings, lovers (Evar and Livira, Clovis and Arpix), and friends. And finally, there are the separate plots within their various alternate universes. In one, that means dealing with the early stages of antisemitism and fascism in pre-war Germany, which is about to erupt into violence. In another, it’s trying to save a kingdom from an impending Skeer invasion. And in another it’s dealing with a dictatorial Potentate who overthrew the king and installed a fascist system that also uses an oppressed minority as a scapegoat and distraction.

The characters and their relationships have been a strength throughout the series, and that somewhat holds true here. The problem is two-fold. One, by scattering the characters so widely in space and time (and then sometimes re-scattering them), we end up with fewer interactions amongst them and thus a weaker sense of relationship. That doesn’t happen across the board: the interactions between Evar and Starval, and between Kerrol, Yute, and Anne are particularly compelling, but the others fare less well. What also contributes to this issue is that there is just so much plot, so much moving and transporting and fighting and overall action crammed into a relatively short, for fantasy, book (under 400 pages), that we don’t get to linger in the interaction for all that long before we’re off to another group or interrupted by another crisis or bit of violence.

I had the same sort of good-but-not-as-good response to the themes, which are seriously weighty and are explored in thoughtful fashion. But the issue I had is this was also true in books one and two, mostly involving the exact same themes, and so this all feels a bit of been-there-done-that. Here’s is what I said in my review of book one:

A partial listing of themes/subjects include: the power of stories; the nature of language, knowledge, and memory; our seemingly knee-jerk xenophobic response to “the Other” and our rationalization of such a response by dehumanizing them; our treatment of refugees; the interplay of censorship, misinformation, and disinformation/propaganda; the question of who gets access to information; the corrosive impact of a thirst for vengeance; the impact of trauma, the ease with which we weaponize seemingly every advancement in knowledge and technology, found families, knowledge versus wisdom.

And here is my list from book two:

the power of stories and word; the cycle of cruelty, violence, and self-destruction; the question of whether preserving knowledge helps maintain the light of civilization or sparks the conflagration that burns it all down; the difference between justice and vengeance, the difficulty in choosing empathy over righteous and justified anger; the ways we dehumanize the Other.

You can see the overlap, and that continues here, with nearly all those themes, save perhaps the refugees and vengeance appearing here as well. The ideas are certainly worthy of exploration, and we do drill down a bit more specifically into say, the danger of centralizing information, but I’m just not sure we needed three book to explore them. I’m also still trying to suss out my feelings on the real-world entry of the Nazis. On the one hand, I loved the character of Anne and her interactions with Kerrol and Yute, and it does ground the fantasy more firmly to out world. On the other hand, it’s about as on-the-nose a connection as you can choose, Nazis are just not subtle, and I tend to prefer the way that fantasy can make the metaphor literal in a more imaginative sense. I’m thinking some readers will love this choice and think it a brilliant move, some will absolutely hate it and think it a major misstep, and some, like me, will chew it over for a while trying to figure out just which way they are leaning.

As much as I had some issues with the book, Lawrences vivid prose, particularly in descriptive moments, and the wry bit of humor sprinkled throughout a very dark storyline, along with the still-so-very-witty epigraphs that being each chapter, make it an easy read. I never once thought about not continuing. And, as noted, it does resolve the major plot and character arcs, even if the ending feels a bit rushed, and does so while offering up several emotionally touching scenes. I think overall I would have preferred a duology (with book two closer to the length of book 1, which at nearly 600 pages was by far the longest of the three), but it’s still an easy series to recommend, even if its first novel is the strongest.