SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Come chat about anything and everything Unwritten!

If you want to discuss the book as you're reading, please clearly mark where you are in the book so that other brave souls can participate, and respondents can limit spoilers to where you are presently.

A few questions to get conversation started:

1. What did you think of the world?
2. What did you think of the unwritten books?
3, Which stop along the quest was your favorite/least favorite and why?
4. What worked or didn't for you?

Non-spoiler thread here: First impressions

I want to know if there's an unwritten book you'd want to read? I'd head straight to the B shelf for Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Trickster! I still often think about how one of the Sarahs in Sarah Pinsker's "And Then There Were N-One" was reading it.

1. What world? Toddlers on a beach do a better job of worldbuilding than tLotU has. These characters exist in a fog of indescribable nothingness.

it does all feel fairly haphazard and set-like, doesn't it

I'm 20% in. Someone is winded having walked up three flights of stairs heading to the unwritten wing and that's about all I know of the world. There have been a few conversations about different locations in hell and elsewhere but they all have the same feel. It's worse than visiting an IKEA store cause at least IKEA has different kinds of rooms. Set-like indeed.

Imagining a hell devoid of all the funbad things that would get you banished there is certainly something.

I'm separating the world from the characters in my above post.

They're in an armoury now. Don't know how. Only have my own observations of armouries to picture it.

On my gosh! This book is so good! I must have told myself a dozen times while reading it that I was so lucky to find it! Definitely going in my favorite folder!

The book is about a library in Hell that has Unwritten books. Sometimes the characters walk out of their books and sometimes they try to run away, usually to find their author. The Librarian keeps them from doing this or retrieves the runaways.
It's so clever and witty! The character is really the book, so they carry their book around. The Librarian stamps the arm of the character if they are going out! Lol!
The dialogue is so funny and clever. I giggled so many times! The plot, the characters, the world building is all excellent! I can't say enough wonderful things about this book!
I can't wait to get book #2! This was so good! It has so much going for it. Best book I have read so far this year!

Finished now and whilst the numerous locations continued to feel like moving from one neutral toned room to another I did end up engaging with the story. Enjoying the final 20% has left me thinking considerably better of the book than I thought I would.
I was grumbling about the Heaven and Hell dynamic, but Leto's(?) redemption arc made it worthwhile.

That gives me hope, Ryan. I'm getting grumpier and grumpier when I think of picking up the book.

Before I make an attempt on this one, can someone explain why the library of unwritten books is located in hell? What have they done wrong?

Sounds a very interesting concept but some of the comments re execution are not selling it to me.

it's not really explained, Dawn. but it is stated that the library isn't actually in hell, it just is like leasing space there or something

Thanks, Allison! I think I prefer Neil Gaiman's version where there's a library of unwritten books in the Dreaming. Books people have dreamt about but never wrote. Makes more sense :-)

Phew! I was worried that I'd missed the explanation.

Dawn wrote: "Thanks, Allison! I think I prefer Neil Gaiman's version where there's a library of unwritten books in the Dreaming. Books people have dreamt about but never wrote. Makes more sense :-)"

Aah, that's what I thought this one was about by the comments.

Lol @Ryan and @Adrian XD

Well, I'm going to dip my toes into it and then we'll see. Gabi's status updates touched on everything I'd be annoyed by, so I'm not hopeful 😅

Lol I'm ten minutes in and it's already awful. There's no logic to this at all. Why tell a book character they aren't human and therefore should not exist? What if it was a non-human character from a scifi or fantasy book, would it be told the same? Is the MC who is a liibrarian in this otherworldly place a human herself? And why wouls you stop imagined books from existing? I literally want them all to live! Go forth and have a life outside the limit of your book! Now *that* would be beautiful! I'm guessing this is a sort of dystopia of the imagination. Uggh. We'll see how long I can live through this.

I struggled with the first two thirds of the story but I've already forgotten many of the details that annoyed me about it. One of the few things worse than being bad is being utterly forgettable.

I finished, but I will wait for the positive comments here to see what folks liked to get a better view on it. At the moment I feel way too grumpy to give a fair rating.

@Ryan That's certainly true!

I'm going to start by saying I did enjoy the book and I will probably read the next one. Was it the best library-fantasy I've read? No. The potential was there, but I found it fell flat on the world-building and characters. eg. The dead realm did progress Leto's story and revealed Walter's actual role, but there was a lot of time trudging around in the labyrinth that did nothing for me. I wish those words were spent giving me more about the relationship between Claire and Bea. Or more about why Claire actually became the Librarian. The Leto-twist was good, and that drew me in much more and speed up the last part of the story. Obviously the adventure is not over at the end, and again I wonder, if we are meant to get more depth as the series progresses.

Did not live up to my expectations of what sounded like an awesome premise. The last 75 pages did redeem it enough that I gave it 3 stars instead of 2. I thought the ending was good. I just wish the rest of the book had been better developed.

Could be that I missed the explanation, cause my attention was wavering a lot nearing the end: what was the importance of the Devil book for the conquest? Why did the demon wanted to conquer the library? What was the strategical importance of it?

From what I got, Andras wanted the devil book pages to use the power in them to break through the library wards. He wanted the library to use as leverage in his supposed coup of Hell. However, right at then end Malphas said that Andras was good at deception and terrible at strategy, so maybe a coup of hell was not what he was after? I did find it a little convoluted.

Unless your first name is H.P. you really shouldn't use the term "non-euclidean"

Just sayin' it took me a little out of the book.

1. What did you think of the world?
As others have stated, not a lot of world building. I'm not really sure what the library, Hell, Heaven, Valhalla, or Mdina are like. This caused me to struggle with connecting to the story because I could not develop any visual imagery.

4. What worked or didn't for you?
Too many characters and switching of different perspectives. I didn't feel a strong connection or depth to most of the characters.

I agree with Ryan that the last 20% of the book was better. I didn't hate the book.

Having just finished I can say that there is definitely a bit of hand wavey set up that I can't quite get past BUT I did very much like going on an adventure with Claire while trying to ignore the various ways that things should not work like they did.

For me this one is going into my library of the unread.

Christopher wrote: "For me this one is going into my library of the unread."

You and Gabi are the latest two peas in a pod!

I'm almost finished, and I didn't expect to like it when I first started. However, I actually do like it. It has taken me longer to read this for some reason. I'm usually through a book this size in a few days, but its taken more than a week. I can't say that its been my favorite book this year but I did like it. I'll probably give it 3 stars.

Maria wrote: "From what I got, Andras wanted the devil book pages to use the power in them to break through the library wards. He wanted the library to use as leverage in his supposed coup of Hell. However, righ..."

Sorry, I didn't come back to the thread (which is not very polite when I asked a question there, sorry). Thank you for your answer, Maria.

No worries Gabi.